Sucks to be you. I've been running Windows 7 for a day now and I am 100% sure it runs much, much faster than XP ever did (and I went straight from XP to 7, so I should know). Boot time is faster, applications open faster and smoother, everything is lightning fast. Who knows why, optimisation of my dual cores, taking advantage of my 4 gigs of RAM... but what I do know is 7 runs much faster than XP on my computer: