Here are a couple of tips and tweaks that should make your visual studio 2010 experience less of a dragggggg..

Set your visual experience general environment options as follows, I have not noticed any real difference in the prettiness of the IDE but then I mainly develop console and asp.net applications

1) Uncheck Enable rich client visual experience

2) Check Use hardware graphics acceleration if available

Make Visual Studio 2010 faster and more enjoyable 1


Set your startup to an empty environment so the beast starts quicker without having to lookup a bunch of RSS feeds and have a think about what has been done recently so you can just get on with what you want to do.Make Visual Studio 2010 faster and more enjoyable 2


If you have an active anti virus product on the computer find the advanced setting that enables you to exclude certain files/folders from runtime scanning in my case I exclude the following from my avast scanner.

Make Visual Studio 2010 faster and more enjoyable 3


Sure there are many other software options that can help but these are some easy ones that should make a big difference to your development experience.