I have Win7 at work. It “looks” cuter than XP, but it’s not better, and in some ways worse. As Steve Jobs said, “They just don’t get it.” MS tries to add cute features without fixing underlying bugs & annoyances (such as overall sluggishness, file explorer doesn’t update automatically, “Recent Places” often doesn’t show the most obvious things (like that file I was just editing).

One thing that I found helped a lot was to get a non-MS disk defragmenter. I picked Auslogic’s (free) program: very, very easy to use, fast, and does (AFAI can tell) a great job. One option is to “optimize” the disk, i.e. placing key system files in the most quickly accessed parts of the disk. Lastly, fix the swap file at a fixed, reasonable size. Mine is currently fixed at 4 GB (I have only 2 GB of RAM, the most my motherboard can take). Unless you’re doing something like editing video, 2+4 should be much more than enough. Hope this helps!