it does run somewhat faster (but the bloated code more counterbalances that too)... and would take (much) more capacity than ubuntus 9-10GB partition, and 'pour over' into slower territory as you installed more and more programs and updates (plus you need an antivirus app to monitor your system, which slows things down too)... i would need to run ubuntu on the slower portions of the hdd then (i have before, and thats what prompted me to want to switch them because i was originally only running vista)... ...as it is, instead of having vista attain 85MB/s peak, its attaining from 83MB/s on down... its only 2MB/s difference, but its the difference between hosting a whole OS and all its programs on the fastest part, and only a fraction of another OS on that same part
ubuntu is very minimal in demands overall (it isnt doing much of anything in the background), so you can see the speed improvement a lot easier... vista however spends more time indexing and slowing system responsiveness down as a result (even with 2GB ram, 7800GT, X2 3800+ @ 2.4, drive indexing disabled, and most of the desktop visuals disabled too), so the slight partitioning improvement doesnt matter nearly as much... the OS is simply just bloated, i only go to use it really when i decide i want to game, where hdd speed doesnt matter nearly as much overall, (a raptor is ~8ms from beginning to end, so that doesnt change with partitioning, and is what matters most a lot of times, more than throughput)