XP with everything removed (learn to love nLite) will be the fastest for running applications on, but 7 may well feel smoother for normal use.

CarPC uses XP slimmed to hell (180 MB ISO WITH drivers) with a 600 MHz Celeron and 512MB of RAM and a 2GB HDD and it's not slow at all.

if your not gonna game on the laptop (pointless) then use linux ubuntu which i've had friends run on laptops and pcs flawlessley.

but me using my pc for gaming I use xp/ubuntu and getting win 7 for my little work laptop.

win 7 will be better than vista though and you can get versions with the slightly more taxing aero and effects stuff turned off.

ubuntu will allow your laptop to run pretty fast and it's zero coin.

Just keep Windows 7. It has the best power management so your battery will last longer. Reduce the eye-candy if it feels sluggish and/or install more RAM.

Quote from geeman1 :

Just keep Windows 7. It has the best power management so your battery will last longer. Reduce the eye-candy if it feels sluggish and/or install more RAM.

Disagree - my laptop uses ~1w more on 7 then XP, which sounds useless - but my laptop uses 7-8w in XP...

:...have your friend come over to your house (or anywhere you can remote desktop to a better XP PC)and run Crysis or something on it

he/she'll be like :wtf2:

Quote from Jakg :

Disagree - my laptop uses ~1w more on 7 then XP, which sounds useless - but my laptop uses 7-8w in XP...

You are right. I was under the impression that 7 and even Vista had better power management than XP, but quick googling showed that 7, while better than Vista, is still a bit behind XP.

Quote from LFSn00b :

Well, a friend of mine and I have a discussion(not a smart one) about what OS should I install on my laptop, or keep the Windows 7 that it currently has.

The laptop's specs:
AMD Sempron +3000 1.8GHz CPU
512MB RAM
SiS 760GX 64MB GFX Card
60 GB HDD.


The thing is that Windows 7 runs slow whereas XP ran decently - but I don't know what should be a wiser choice. My friend here claims Windows 7 will run better on ANY PC faster than XP, or Vista.

I do not believe him, and I am wanting to install XP on the laptop, which it had. Or should I go even more back and make it run Windows 98 SE?

Mostly all I want to do is prove the guy wrong, but also wanting to find a fast solution to make my laptop faster.

Thanks in advance
Niko

Well first off, why on earth is that machine even running Windows 7 when it doesn't even meet the minimum requirements for the OS??

If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:

• 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  
• 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  
• 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
  
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
  

Put another 512mb (if you can find it) minimum in there if you want to keep Windows 7

As for the question, Win7 is definitely better than Vista performance wise on the same hardware, wouldn't say it was quite as snappy as XP though I've not done a direct comparison, just a XP vs Vista on same hardware and Vista vs Windows 7 on same (different) hardware. I'd put Windows 7 closer to XP than Vista though.

Only issue with XP is that it's not going to be supported very much longer. Though who ever uses microsoft support anyway?

Whatever you do, don't go back to any 9x version of windows, unless you enjoy running out of date applications