With one or two noteworthy exceptions, every review I’ve read of Windows 7 has remarked on its performance. When my colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes took a stopwatch to the new OS, it trounced XP and Vista on just about every measure. That’s been my experience as well.
Even more important than raw speed, though, is reliability. I’ve been carrying around an assortment of Windows 7-powered notebooks recently and have been impressed with its ability to sleep and resume reliably. The Windows 7 power management tools are easy to get to, and I’ve found that its estimates of remaining battery life are generally quite accurate, which certainly wasn’t the case with Windows XP.
