I had quite an adventure trying to speed up my T60p in Vista and XP. I tried a clean install of Vista after the factory version was bogging down (day 2), then tried XP, then went back to another install of Vista off the R&R partition.
Long story short, here are a few tips to try under Vista:
1) Control Panel -> Programs and Features -> Uninstall lots of Lenovo/Thinkvantage programs. The only ones I kept were:
- System update
- Rescue & Recovery 4
- EasyEject Utility
- Presentation Manager
- Power Manager
- Fingerprint Software (Not CSS)
- Active Protection System
- Ultranav Driver / Utility
2) Uninstalled Client Security System. Turned off the encryption/security chip in BIOS. For some reason, this bogged down my system (lots of Not-Responding windows) especially when running heavy apps like Photoshop & Dreamweaver.
3) ran MSCONFIG to see what startup items are being called, and after disabling them, ran MSCONFIG CLEANUP (freeware prog) to keep them from loading at startup. LOTS of bloat programs being loaded at startup = my computer whirling after I log in with no ability to do anything but wait.
4) Ran CCLEANER (freeware) which cleaned up the registry after I removed a lot of apps.
5) Turned off Aero and stuck with a Windows Classic theme.
6) Turn off .xml indexing (which has helped a lot of people from having vista indexing all the time. Control Panel -> Indexing Options -> Advanced -> File Types -> uncheck .xml
7) Control Panel -> Backup & Restore -> Create a Restore point or change settings -> uncheck all drives under Automatic restore.

computer -> right-click on main Hard drive -> Properties -> Disk Cleanup -> Erase as much as you can.
9) Defrag the drive with PerfectDisk.
Beyond this, and depending how much you want to dive into the nitty-gritty, you can also turn off selective services that run in the background. But those are user-specific.
Good luck