I/O counters in Task Manager
One of my freaky habits is to check the I/O counters in the task manager. Whenever I'm doing I/O intensive stuff I like to quickly look at the MBs processed.
Whether these counters are updated or not is controlled by a registry setting (see below). You can set the value to 0 to disable it or 1 to enable it. Disabling it gives a little performance boost since Windows doesn't have to take care of the counters but on test systems I like to enable it. SQLIOSim also requires it to be enabled to get some of it's results.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\I/O System\CountOperations
By the way, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (fixlist) is getting very close. Keep an eye out for it because it contains fixes to improve performance of SQL Server 2005 under heavy load. More details will follow.