One of my favorites, when someone wants to know what a DBA does:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Administering/thevalueofadba/1806/

Check this out:

http://groups.google.pl/group/microsoft.public.sqlserver.server/browse_thread/thread/89b28d54a808c91e/6e1bee55a73098f2

Is this maybe what you are looking for?

http://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/audit/hardware_performance_optimization_p1.aspx

Some things that have helped me reduce the pain of replication over the years:

As suggested earlier by David, move the distributor to a separate box if possible. Granted there may...

Just a wild guess. I'm not even sure it's possible, considering you've been working with the database, but is it possible your database is in single user mode?

Idera's SQLsafe backup software now has a version 4.5 that enables recovery of individual tables. I am currently on 4.0, just haven't had the time to upgrade, but wanted to make...