<p>I have Windows 7 up and it’s using a gig of RAM doing nothing. I suppose that you can use VM but that’s slow and will add wear and tear on your disk. Windows 7 is better at using threads so it will make better use of multicore processors. My laptop has 3xxx Intel Integrated and Windows 7 runs fine with that. 950 must be pretty old and I can imagine subpar performance.</p>
<p>Vista had a lot of problems which I mentioned a while ago. It generally runs fine on high-spec machines but it ran like a dog on my laptop. It had a few corruption bugs that were really bad. If you didn’t run into them - okay. If you did, it was bad news. It was apparently fixed in Windows 7 so I suspect that it will be fixed in Vista SP3.</p>
<p>One other thing about Vista - the nag popups are annoying. I still have two Vista machines which I don’t plan to upgrade. Those are Core i7 machines which have no problems dealing with the inefficiencies of Vista.</p>
<p>I am a long time user of XP, have helped my kids with their Vista machines, and just built a Win 7 computer. Since I am use to XP, I don’t like how some things are done differently in 7.</p>
<p>They both run my programs, which is the purpose of the OS. It is hard for me to compare speed because the XP’s are Pentium 4’s, and the Win 7 is an i7. So what if 7 boots or shuts down faster? I only do that once a day.</p>
<p>I hate the taskbar in Win 7. In XP, I can click right to the window I want. In Win 7, I have to click to the application, and then to the desired window of that application. The idea is to reduce the steps to do something, not increase. That’s just one of the quirks that I am trying to figure out if there are options to change how Win 7 looks.</p>
<p>On a related issue are the trees. I like trees. I like how a lot of XP defaults to trees. It helps to keep things organized, and get to something quickly. While you can get to the tree structure in Win 7, it seems like you have to force your way down the tree, rather than glide through with XP.</p>
<p>Oh course there is a way in W7 to change the taskbar to the look of XP/Vista. I’m not sure of it now because I’m on my XP partition. I haven’t really used W7 that much because I have all of my important files and programs on XP, so switching back and fourth when I want to use a certain program isn’t worth it and neither is reinstalling all of my programs. If I were to get a new computer I would definitely use the W7 OS.</p>
<p>For the record, you can change the superbar to resemble the taskbar you see in XP. You just go to properties, and switch it from “always stack” or something to “never stack”. I’ve only used 7 once, so I don’t remember it step by step.</p>