Speeding up Sitecore Development Installation

There are a number of options to speed up the Sitecore development installation:

Disable the indexes. Indexes are responsible for the search bar in Sitecore taskbar. If you can work without it, then comment out the <indexes> section inside the database section in web.config (that is most probably /databases/master/indexes). The search will be disabled, along with index updates on each item create/update/delete operation.
Switch your site to the 'live' mode. Live mode completely eliminates the need for publishing, which can be annoying in development scenarios, by taking all items directly from the content authoring database. To activate this go to your website in <sites> section of web.config (the site is called 'website' by default) and change database="web" to database="master". This is the way Sitecore client site works with the core database. Naturally, by switching the publishing off you also lose the publishing restrictions, that is 'do not publish/publish date' features.