I am dual booting on a separate hard disk and have installed win7 64 bit. Granted, my XP installation is kind of bogged down and "dirty" (lot's of stuff installed) compared to my win7 installation (which only has a couple of things installed, i haven't fully migrated yet), but i was still surprised to see that win7 64 was considerably faster in things like alt+tabbing in and out of games than my XP 32.
To top it off, Win7 is installed on a slower hard drive...5400RPM western digital 1.5TB, as opposed to the seagate 1.5TB that i boot XP from... that seagate is either 7200 or 10000 RPM (i can't recall exactly which), which is considerably faster. And still XP feels slower in many regards. Win7 also gives better performance in some newer games/demos i have tried. Where win7 is slower is usually file tranfers involving a lot of small/medium sized files (i was moving data back and forth between the drives for backup purposes), but it could be a function of the slower WD drive as i was moving files to that one.
To be really sure i'd have to test it with hard drives of equal speeds and do it both ways for both OSs (moving the same files from seagate to WD and vice versa, once for each OS), which can't be really done as my WD requires special drivers to work at optimal speed under XP. I didn't install these drivers because they are not required for Vista/Win7, that WD is booting win7 and everything that i run under XP is located on the other drive. Since everything that runs under win7 is loading from the drive that boots win7, i opted not to install the XP compatibility package.
In any case, if your PC can handle win7 64 i think it's a good OS, much better than Vista was initially and probably what Vista wanted to be. I'm running it on an i7 920 stock (no overclocking at all), Ati 4890 1GB and 3GB of RAM (in 3x1GB sticks tripple channel configuration). Funny enough, just booting the system eats up an entire GB of my RAM but i have a suspicion that it's well optimized for pre-caching, for example alt+tabbing from a game to the desktop is nearly instantaneous in win7 64 despite the increased memory usage and eye-candy, while in XP 32 there is a noticeable delay. Win7 64 also boots faster in the portion of the boot up to the login screen, but has visible delays during loading the desktop on first use, or whenever something new is installed. That's another reason i'm suspecting there's a kind of pre-caching algorithm at work, it takes some more time to load up the desktop properly but then everything clearly seems faster.
I guess that having 4GB or more of RAM would really make win7 64 shine (that's actually the main reason i installed it, i might get another set of 3x1GB RAM sticks when SOW is released and the total RAM would be unusable without a 64 bit OS) as long as you are running new stuff and not something older that might have compatibility issues. For example, all my current games i run under XP, but when SoW comes i'll be running it under Win7 64.
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