Lotus Nut

This actually applies to all Standard versions of Notes and, really, any other Eclipse-based app that has tons of files installed.

Get Defraggler. Now.

Then use it to defrag your Notes folder. After uninstalling an 8.5 Beta and installing 8.0.2 Gold, there were over 2,000 fragmented files in my Notes path! If you want to scrounge every bit of performance out of Notes, you should defrag the folder. Sure, Notes 8.0.2 will load faster without doing this, but fragmentation is a performance killer - especially on slower laptop drives. Defraggler, and some other tools I'm sure, provide the ability to do this. You can defrag single or multiple files (ahem, VM images) or highlight the path the file is in and defrag all files in that path. This gives you a rather quick defrag without having to wait for the entire drive to be defragged.