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#1
W7 64-bit as slow as Vista 32-bit? Your experience?
I was a die hard XP fan, then in anticipation of Win7, bought a laptop last summer with Vista 32bit Home Premium and a free W7 upgrade. Lots of eye candy with aero, which I like, BUT the thing that drives me crazy is when I move a 2MB file (for instance) from the desktop to the recycle bin, the progress bar pops up, and it takes 4 or 5 seconds to move the file!! A 2MB file!! That should be instantaneous, as it is in XP! And it's not aero... many people say to turn it off, (the only GOOD thing about the OS!) but if the OS were not so lumbering, aero might flash the progress bar, but as soon as it appeared, it would disappear.
I thought W7 64-bit would make the OS run like XP 32bit. Maybe with a bajillion GBs of RAM and a bank of quad core processors it does, but on my Acer Aspire 4530 with 3GB RAM and a typical dual core CPU, it runs as slow as Vista! When I go to delete something off the desktop, that's when I notice it. This is extremely irritating, and I'm wondering if W7 32-bit would be faster, or if this entire Vista engine just won't be as fast as XP unless you use 64-bit with 8GB RAM or more... (FTR this laptop only supports 4GB.)
I wanted to build a new system that would be future proof for awhile, so I did not want to choose XP... but if we have to wait until W8 to get a proper OS that runs as fast as XP, AND we won't be able to migrate from W7 to W8, but will have to start a new build, then it's hardly worth it to suffer with W7 in the meantime... I just can't believe they didn't improve this aspect of the Vista engine in 7!
FTR, I have bg defragmenting disabled, and only allow very few programs to do auto-updating, (such as NOD32 and BitDefender). I am a miser when it comes to allowing anything to run in the bg, and I don't open multiple windows and programs at once. CPU usage is normal in Task Mgr (nothing is sucking it up) and processes are all normal (nothing hogging resources). I also installed the 64-bit drivers from Acer for W7 when I installed the OS. To further guard against it being slow, I made its partition 75GB, of which 55% is free (41GB). (Am using the built-in firewall b/c I want to see how it performs with as little drag on it as possible.)
I reaaaally like the aero look of W7 and Vista too.. if it was responsive like XP 32bit, I would be TOTALLY IN LOVE. But I can't live with the CRAWLING when I am doing something that should literally take a millisecond. I spend 12-14 hrs a day on my machine, and need it to be responsive.
What have the rest of you done about this? I am very curious!