Win 7 impact on my desktop speed

I am new to this forum and joined because i am thinking about replacing my Win XP OS with Win 7. I have been very happy with how XP has performed but feel i should upgrade for no particular reason. I have a desktop which i bought from a custom maker about 1 1/2 years ago. I thought it was a real upgrade from a Dell inspiron 8600 laptop i had and would process a lot faster. I only use my PC for email, surfing, a few games, photos, music etc..nothing elaborate. Anyway I have been disappointed by the speed of my new pc since i got it and have worked with the company's tech support to tweak it quite a bit to make it faster.That has helped somewhat, but still is short of my expectations.Sooo...i wondered if my problem is the fact that i still use XP as my OS and whether replacing it with Win 7 would help make it run faster. I dont really have any other reason to buy Win 7 based on how i use it,but the Tech guy from where i bought it said XP is not enabling me to take advantage of the hardware i have in my current PC.

Any feedback on this would be appreciated. I have always routinely run various free utilities and diagnostics on my computer to keep it "clean" so i dont think that is any part of my problem.

thanks again.

I am not a technical computer person,but have been using desktops and laptops extensively for the past 10 years.I have also learned through trial and error how to fix every problem i have ever had with a computer, and I've had a lot of them!

When i decided to replace my 4 year old Dell 8600 laptop with a new "state of the art" dessktop, with a faster processor, more memory etc I just assumed it would run faster, process instructions more quickly etc. After using my current desktop for about 6months I found that it didnt/doesnt really operate any faster than my old laptop. As i mentioned in the original post i worked on line with the tech support guy of the place that built my pc , tweaking a variety of areas in the BIOS etc . It helped a little,but not nearly so much as i expected.

Basically, when i use my desktop there are as much as 10-15 second delays in it processing an instruction from the time i press enter until it performs that function. I see many of my friends pcs and they seem to operate much more quickly in spite of not having any faster processors, more memory etc.Sometimes i will press control alt delete and before i can press the end task button, the function i was waiting to see completed will finish. I get the feeling that pressing the control alt delete button somehow made the instruction finish itself.Routinely, when i look at the Windows Task Manager my CPU is operating at 1% in the Performance section and has more than ample memory not being utilized.

I typically do use my pc for multi tasking. i will usually have my music programs playing while also using the pc for other tasks like email, net surfing etc. but dont really notice any difference when i am just using one program. My email..outlook express..works fine. My problems with speed relate only to the internet.I will say that when i use Firefox it works faster than when i use IE8. Maybe my problem is with IE8.

Thanks for you help.

Have you tried a clean install? Most of the time crapware cause laptops to slow down. And also, stop tweaking to increase performance. Tweaking doesn't help at all.

Yes, i did try a clean install and it didnt help. When i said tweaking I meant that i did everything the tech support rep for the company which built my desktop told me to do.I figured he knew his stuff because he built the computer, or so he said. the company is ALL PC ZONE in Cleveland. If i had it to do all over again I would buy an HP or a Dell desktop so i wouldnt wonder if they did something "wrong" when they built my custom desktop.