Windows 7 is not much faster than Vista

Performance enhancements were one of Microsoft's goals when developing Windows 7 product key, and many earlier estimates suggested that the new operating system seemed faster than Vista. However, the reality is not so.
The tests for the Windows 7 Release Candidate at PC World's testing center showed that Windows 7 was only slightly faster with the WorldBench 6 test suite.
Testers installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate on three systems (two desktops and a laptop) and ran the WorldBench 6 software. They then compared the results with those from the three systems. The same system is running Windows product key Vista. Each machine is a bit faster when running Windows 7, but in no case overall performance improved by more than 5%.
The biggest difference is 4 points - 102 for Vista and 106 for Windows 7 on the HP Pavillion a6710t desktop. The other two test systems also show a slight improvement in performance: the Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop is up 1 point (from 138 on Vista to 139 on Windows 7), and the Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop Earned 2 points, from 97 on Vista to 99 on Windows 7.
WorldBench 6 includes tests with 10 popular applications such as Microsoft Office, Firefox and Photoshop, and so on. In testing individual applications, the test results change only a few percent. One notable difference is that with Nero 7 Ultra Edition, Windows 7 delivers impressive improvements, up from 12% to 26% depending on the test system. But Jeff Kuta, director of PC World's testing center, said the difference could be due to hard drive drivers being updated in Windows 7. Improvements to support hard drive access Windows 7 will significantly affect the applications used to use as many hard drive as Nero. The test for WinZip, which is heavily dependent on other hard drives, also shows significant improvements in Windows 7.

Testers also showed a remarkable 7% acceleration on Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP3 (DirectX) software running on the HP Pavilion desktop equipped with the nVidia GeForce 9300GE graphics card. The nVidia drivers seem to be optimized for Windows 7 rather than Windows Vista.
On the other hand, each system takes a little more time to perform tests with Microsoft Office and Firefox when running on Windows 7 than when running on Vista.
But bear in mind that these tests are conducted on the Windows 7 Release Candidate. While the features of the operating system are almost unchanged in the official release, Microsoft engineers can still find a way to improve performance.
If these results are not improved in the final version of Windows 7, this seems to be a disappointment for many Windows users. One of the main complaints about Windows Vista is that it runs slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 does not significantly improve this situation, it's hard to convince users to abandon Windows XP product key.
However, there are some aspects that are not included in the test, such as boot time, although Windows 7 has a much faster bootup time than Windows Vista. The best way to be self-aware about Windows 7 performance is to download the Release Candidate and run it on your own computer system.