Using Pro Tools with Windows 7

Got a new laptop with Windows 7. Overall Windows 7 is good. I especially like hovering over the bar at the bottom and seeing a thumbnail of the screens of the apps that are running.

But I digress. I loaded Pro Tools 8 on the laptop (I use MBox2 for interface). Pro Tools does not *officially* run on Windows 7 yet.
Indeed, when I loaded up everything, which took a good chunk of an evening and the next, Pro Tools ran chunky and unusable on the Windows 7 laptop. Uh Oh, I should have bought that iMac...

Surely this can't be right. The laptop has 6 GB RAM and dual core processor. It should be much faster than my single processor PC. Maybe it just needs some tweaking.

Windows 7 tweaking suggestions aren't posted yet. But Digidesign does have Vista optimization instructions here. Although the screens are different, they aren't different by much. The tweaks involve turning off ClearType font smoothing and setting the performance settings to give priority to background tasks rather than programs. This was surprising. I would expect that Pro Tools would want its program to have priority. But this significantly helped performance. And now it is back up and working.