Have you tried notepad+? My favorite... of course office is the best, I assume were talking about windows notepad replacements...
I still run on XP. Every function is "done in a blink"... not "slow as shit"... not slow at all. Perhaps your XP needs a garbage clean-out?
Even a new reinstall is no competition for 7. I'm sure there are still things XP will do just fine. I'm sure there are things that a Win95 box will do just fine. Just saying that for most things, 7 is much faster. if you take the time to do so, you can make it very similar to Server 2008 with everything but necessities turned on.
I've got 7 PCs around here (sheesh, who needs that many?) 4 with XP, 3 with W7. Slight differences in each, no clear winner in performance. (I do think about security, however. "They" say W7 is "much more secure"... not sure what that means in a practical sense... never been "attacked"... only picked up one virus over the years.. and that was during XP updates from Microsoft site...) Some say, "W7 is better". Maybe... but even if so (and not clearly that from where I sit)... not "better enough" to justify the time and effort to change everything over to W7...
Biggest thing that people forget is that the vast majority of XP users are running XP home, basic or pro SP3 x86 (32-bit XP with service pack 3). This has been beaten to death but XP_PRO_32-Bit with 4GB RAM + a decent video card with 1GB onboard RAM will only give you 2.2GB of system RAM. Heaven forbid you have a dual-CPU machine (like a HP or Dell Xeon box) then you chop that in half and essentially give yourself 1.1-1.6GB of RAM per CPU - which actually can slow down even the fastest of CPUs. You can't compare XP_PRO_32 to W7_PRO_x64. How many folks know the difference between XPx64 and W7x64? XP or XP64 isn't a bad platform to run depending on your needs. Anyone complaining just doesn't know the differences between the OS'es you are talking about.
That's waaayyy over most ET'ers head, don't you think? And if they have a dual CPU box, they've probably already learned this... You're using 10x or more horsepower ... than the average ET'er ever uses...
You'd be surprised... The last NYSE market making firm was doing exactly that with HP xw8600 workstations. They had two Xeon 5482 CPUs each and 2x NVIDIA GeForce 9800 cards with 512mb each card. Running XP Pro 32-bit with 4.0GB of DDR2 ECC. Their bios was setup to block the memory into one chunk vs. divide it evenly between the two CPUs however they still started at 3.2GB then the video cards took out a gig so they had 2.2GB available to the machine or essentially 1.1GB each CPU since the processes were split evenly. This is a firm with 40 guys on the NYSE floor and decent off-floor operations. Pretty sad... The traders used to bitch and moan every day and they had even started to buy new hardware for them... In 2 weeks we converted over to 64-bit OS and put 8GB ram in each machine. Night & day difference.
Well, yeah.. but isn't the average ET'er 1. Trying to run 4-8 monitors on a $200 PC? 2. Running XP-32bit w/1 or 2 GB RAM 3. Working from his mom's basement 4. Sitting in front of the screen in his skivvies 5. Drinking Irish coffee in the AM, Budweiser in the PM?
TJ.. There were Dual CPU board before there were dual/quad core single CPUs. Does, say, dual CPU with 2-cores each have any performance advantage over a single CPU with 4-cores today?