Well, Windows Se7en finally came out.

With high hopes I installed it, the 64-bit Ultimate Edition. It's colorful, beautiful, full of special effects and animations, which, for me is.. totally useless. It, while idle, eats up to 21% of my 4GBs (almost 1GB for the system alone!), takes up to ~14GB on the hard drive (no programs installed).
My greatest wish was for a modest, stable 64bit system, optimized for performance rather than special effects, on which doing 3D would be more efficient... but M$ had its own vision. The system must have the looks of those 3d-interfaced, sci-fi movie ones, plenty of sound and go by the rule "the more gadgets - the better".

Okay - I said to myself - but what about disabling some options, turning the damn Aero off and tweaking this and that? The first impression - everything is hard to find, kind of chaotic. Eventually I tweaked what I could, only to go down with the RAM to 20% (of 4GB). I heard that the system uses as much memory as it can (sic!) to keep up good performance, and frees up when its needed by another application... but for me its kind of hard to believe... Gotta run some tests.

Finally, I've done a quick render test with [Max 2009 32bit + Vray SP2 32bit @ WinXP 32bit] vs [Max 2009 64bit + Vray SP2 64bit @ Win7 Ultimate 64bit], only to find out... Yes, your suspicion is correct - the 64bit version on fresh and clean Win7 was SLOWER by exactly 2min 40sec than the 32bit version on my a little dusty (couple of programs installed) XP!* My only little question sound something like this: WTF?!

My hopes were crushed, Windows Se7en is just another consumer media-fun system after all. It seems pretty stable, but it's only flashy. A tweaked Vista if you'd prefer. The only advantage it has over XP is the 64bit architecture, which allows to use >3GB of RAM, but having 4GB as myself, it doesn't provide almost ANY improvements for a plain 3D artist. Fine, if I'd have 8GB instead of those 4, I'd have to migrate to Se7en. Otherwise, I'll pass.

*Render test: 640x480px, GI@High settings, Caustics On, Mitchelli-Netrevali, DMC@min2max60.
Results:
WinXP 32b -> 42min 1,6sec
Win7 Ultimate 64b -> 44m 40sec