Antivirus

Have you tried speeding up Windows 7 yet? You can turn off the indexing feature and that alone will give you a somewhat noticeable difference in speed right away, along with heat. (Did it on my laptop after a few weeks of having Win 7 and is dramatically made a difference as my specs are not too far ahead of the bare minimum).

I actually have indexing disabled. I had a similar problem with vista I believe, and when I installed 7 it was the same deal. It really seems to be antivirus programs that slow my computer dramatically. It's a dual core 2.something GHz with 2 Gb of ram, and just an integrated graphics card. I thought maybe it could have been some of the windows 7 aero or whatever it's called using processor resources for calculations that would normally be offloaded onto a decent GPU. If I don't have an antivirus, however, my computer runs fast. Usually faster than my acceptability limit. Norton(and avant) seem to just completely bog down my system. Right now I have Norton back on here... I'm giving it another chance to integrate with windows 7 since they've now hopefully had time to work out the kinks. When I first installed it Windows 7 had just came out of the beta.