Probably because they've released something new and want you to update. But all the software and hardware I installed was fine.
My Wacom tablet is 6 months old.

* ALM Doesnt see much difference.
Probably because you haven't run 3Dmark or other gaming benchmarks on your laptop while running XP and Vista.
How much RAM does your PC have, my laptop has 1Gig and is just as fast, if not faster, with Vista than my old one with 256MB with XP.
That's because XP needs more RAM than 256 MB to function properly and fast. I have 1 GB of RAM in my PC and Vista is noticable slower than Windows XP and 2k3. There could also be plenty of other reasons why XP could be slower on your old machine than Vista on your laptop. Could you post the specs of both your laptop and your older machine?
You can disable that you know. (Control Panel > User Accounts > Turn User Account Control on and off > Use UAC to help protect your computer [uncheck] > OK > Restart Machine)
Yeah, I've tried that, but it didn't really change anything.

But I havent seen a change in performance, but 5% isnt really much anyway.
What I meant with that is that Vista apparently runs so much stuff in the background that your CPU can't be completely idle anymore. I think it shouldn't be that way. In my opinion an OS should be light and fast, not bloated like Vista. I know it's possible to turn off a lot of the extra functions in Vista to make it lighter, but it will always need more resources than XP.
Two Vista computers detected my memory stick fine.
My USB memory sticks also worked fine, but both my external harddrives weren't detected by Vista.