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Different OS, different drivers, maybe even different hard drive (or at least a freshly formatted partition that's not fragmented) - if you say so, I'm sure it runs faster, but the extra bits are probably not the ones responsible.

And add - "a shiny, clean registry that isn't bogged down with years' worth of crap and corruptions".

That alone is why a new Windows box seems really peppy at first, but after a few months of normal use, literally gets a whole hell of a lot slower (depending on what you do on it).

Unless an app can actually use the extra address space, most of the boost you see is from the faster hardware and a clean install.

/P