Well, that's hardly surprising since you limited the ram to 3gig. I notice upon visiting my parents that their i5 with 3gigs cranks the hdd whilst my 8400(@3.8ghz) with 4gigs just opens things quite quickly in comparison (both win7 64bit).
I had the same attitude to XP when it came out. It took a complete OS failure at a LAN event to make me install XP, and I was very unhappy about it, whilst the friendly chaps helping me politely waited for me to stop being a dick.
Once I had mouse accel sorted, I thought XP was actually very good.
I shifted to Win 7 quite early on and completely refused to boot to XP ever again.
And in the spirit of completeness: Vista was
xxxx .
Edit:: Blackdog, just curious: why do you always make such bloody long posts? Not in any way complaining, just asking