Windows 7 running slower than Vista?

First of all, consider that your copy of 7 is the release candidate so there will be some leftover debugging code and other crap that will slow it down a bit. The way you have your drive partitioned won't directly contribute to how fast 7 runs, but if you don't leave enough room on your 7 partition for the swap file (depending on how much ram you have of course), you could be setting yourself up for less than ideal performance.

Edit: there are partition re-sizing tools built into Windows (both Vista and 7). Open the Disk Management wizard to access them.

Thanks, I think I will just upgrade my primary partition to w7 now and see how it goes....

Be sure to backup the data. I *thought* I had my data backed up when I did a partition resize. It didn't go well. Had to reformat the drive and Oops there were three files on my dekstop that weren't backed up. That hurt worse that the failed partition resizing.

The order of the partition CAN affect the speed of an OS. data is read faster from the outside of a platter. if you end up with an OS partition which is only on the inner bit of the HDD it can be slower. Look up the article tom's did on "short stroking" a few months ago.

with a much smaller second partition, this is more likely to happen than evenly spread partitions due to spreading over platters.

Once again, thanks guys for the info, really helped