I did the upgrade feature for my alienware laptop M17 from Vista Home Prem to Win7 Home Prem. I noticed a performance decrease in general... more HD accesss.. Ive defragged the HD and the file system. Removed all the remaining old windows files. has anyone noticed this from doing an upgrade?
I've only noticed a massive improvement in performance on my setup, granted it is not a laptop. It's not that games or applications run noticeably fasters; it's more that the operating system itself feels a hell of a lot more responsive and there's far less hard drive thrashing. Oh and Windows 7 boots up and shuts down quicker. I did an in-place upgrade from Vista SP2 x64 too so I'm running all the same startup apps and stuff. Considering Windows 7 seems to use fewer services than Windows Vista I'd say that your performance issues are likely caused by some third-party software that you have running that perhaps isn't working as well as it should be with Windows 7. Have you tried disabling all your non-Microsoft startup apps using MSConfig to see if that reduces HDD accessing? If it does then you could re-enable those apps one by one until you find the one that is causing the problem. My guess would be that's it due to your anti-virus or anti-spyware software which tends to access the HDD more than most software does.
No performance loss on my upgrade from ultimate x64 to ult. win7 x64. Only thing I really noticed which ain't a big deal, is I stay on the Welcome loading screen for few seconds longer, but I'm sure that's because I turned off prefetching etc..
