Yea the battery in my laptop seems to last a good deal longer with win7. I am only using XP on my laptop because, unfortunately, that is what I am working with for school right now. They have not updated their program to do MCP for Vista or Win 7 yet. Soon as I am done with my current coursework, I am ditching this archaic, old eyesore of an OS and going back to win 7.
Only because people fear change or are too cheap to. I used to be the same way. But after using Vista then Win7, I cannot stand to even use XP anymore.
I take it you have pretty low ram requirements then. Soon as I have the money I am going back to 8gb. I find myself running out of ram only having 4gb.