Vista's 'sweet spot' is around 4 cores. If you have quad core (or better), Vista will always be more responsive than XP Pro.

The issue here is that your laptop was sold with an operating system that is not designed to run on it.

7 is pretty snappy on an E5200..maybe it's faster than Vista?

Sounds reasonable, this is a T7500 with 3gb of RAM, seems that it should run better than it did. Hard drive is a 7200RPM, and video is an 8600m gt, so I don't think either of those are holding it back.

It wasn't just a little less responsive. It was 20 seconds for Firefox 3 to open on vista, and about 2 seconds on xp. I have it set to sleep when I close the lid, and on vista it took a good 30 seconds before it was usable again, with XP it's about 5.

Windows 7 mainly improves the perception of performance rather than any actual improvement.

Is Vista really that much worse than 7? My E5200 / 4Gb with integrated video runs 7 Ultimate (beta) beautifully...about ten seconds to resume from standby, give or take a few.

I have a 3 yr old XP laptop with a Core Duo T2300 and a gig of ram and Win 7 is snappier than XP <_<

It also has integrated graphics and somehow Aero seems smoother than on my HTPC.

I thought about getting Vista Ultimate (student price FTW), but I might just hold out for 7..

Was it really? Really? Or did it just feel like it was 20 WHOLE SECONDS?

This is a huge part of the reason Microsoft's primary goal for Windows 7 was to improve the perceived responsiveness rather than setting any lofty computation performance objective. A 1 second pause feels like 2 seconds but a 5 second pause feels like 30. It's entirely psychological and I bet if you reinstalled Vista on your laptop and broke out a stopwatch you'd never get the kinds of times you're reporting.

Are you comparing S3 to S3 here (or did you let Vista drop your laptop down to S4 to conserve power)? Did you properly configure power management for a laptop (by disabling hybrid sleep)? Do you have any hardware devices (including USB) that might be preventing or interfering with ACPI power management? ACPI is complex and I can pretty much guarantee that it's a hardware or wetware problem.

No

Especially not in beta. 7 decided it would be entertaining and cut my hard drive's performance in half. (Yes DMA was on, yes my chipset drivers were installed)

I'm wondering if he has a lot of extensions installed...we have a laptop at work that's running Vista, and Firefox takes an eternity to launch. I haven't timed it, but I would not doubt if it's in the 20sec range.

i rounded up, it was 18 seconds when i timed it. same extentions installed both times, just adblock and foxmarks.

If you mean Adblock Plus delete the adblockplus folder in your profile and then resubscribe to your filters set setitngs etc... that saved me 11 seconds the last time I did it (on XP).