Windows 7 (and 8, and 8.1) are actually quicker than XP on most machines, given that your PC has >=1G RAM. Obviously it's difficult to beat XMonad's startup sp

Windows 7 (and 8, and 8.1) are actually quicker than XP on most machines, given that your PC has >=1G RAM. Obviously it's difficult to beat XMonad's startup speed. However, the problem with old machines is not the OS, as the OS itself barely consumes any resources compared to browsers, for example. So you might save X MB of RAM by using XMonad instead of Gnome or Windows, but it does not help if a Chrome tab needs 100 MB (The Verge front page, for example).