I've had Windows 7 running at peak performance for years in boot-camp, on my early '08 Macbook Pro. My understanding is that any general-purpose desktop OS is

I've had Windows 7 running at peak performance for years in boot-camp, on my early '08 Macbook Pro. My understanding is that any general-purpose desktop OS is susceptible to slow-down over time unless you properly maintain it. In the case of OS X, it was slow from the beginning (at least, relatively...compared to Windows, on the same exact hardware).