I also run Vagrant VM's for various things on Windows 7. The key for speed isn't the OS, 8GB RAM and a SSD for your main drive is awesome. The PC I built last

I also run Vagrant VM's for various things on Windows 7. The key for speed isn't the OS, 8GB RAM and a SSD for your main drive is awesome. The PC I built last fall is super fast, the little Windows start up screen doesn't finish painting before login prompt. Creating a custom vagrant box is key since you get to put whatever you want on it and not have to rely on someone else's Vagrant base box. Then you can create VM's for different purposes like trying out a new framework or language or upgrades. You also can match it exactly to whatever VPS image you would use for production.