Slower Than Molasses

Okay, my laptop has 3 gig of memory. Unfortunately, it also came with Vista. And while it's been slow anyway, I'm sick and tired of the endless boot and shutdown times, and the fact it seems to keep deciding to eat up all the memory and lock up Explorer even so I have to manually turn the damn thing off. Seriously, I had far less problems with my old Windows 98 computer.

Anybody know some good advice for tweaking Vista to suck less? I've tried google, which brings up lots of results, but lots are cosmetic changes, or haven't seen to have an effect. I've already scanned for viruses, I've got a spyware scanner. I guess defrag's the next step, but it takes so damn long, especially on huge modern hard drives.

And yes, "upgrade to Linux" is one solution, and I probably will dual-boot this beast eventually, but not yet.