Scott Dorman — Windows Vista: Kernel Changes – Shadows of Reliability, Performance and Scalability

Vista makes fewer and larger disk reads for page faults and system cache read-ahead and has removed the 64KB limit. Fewer, faster, and larger disk writes for the system page file and mapped file I/O reduce the page file fragmentation and allow a larger cluster size.

The CPU usage has also been improved by providing improvements in the concurrency management within the kernel.