Using Sonar with an i7 on XP? Please read...

Hi guys,
 
If you're using an i7 system with Win XP, you may want to read my tale and consider a Win7 upgrade: 
 
I've been in a state of disbelief for the past few days.  I've used this i7 965 with 12 gigs of RAM for about a year now.  Because I wanted to be safe business-wise I've stayed on XP to make sure all of my software will work.  XP only sees 3 gigs of my RAM (I bought 12g just in case I wanted to upgrade in the future), but like they say- if it aint broke don't fix it, right?  Well...
 
As you've probably heard Pro Tools 9 was released last week and it requires Win7 to run.  Me, being the "play it safe" guy that I am, bought a new hard drive for W7 so I could preserve the current setup.  So I get this thing rolling and it turns out I'm able to use both Pro Tools and Sonar to track all 16 channels with the buffer set at 32.  No big deal, right?  Well, with my old setup that was impossible because the engine would drop out or have static noises at random spots and drive me CRAZY.  This initial testing was done using 12 sessions that I tracked 2 weeks ago that I haven't mixed yet (no FX whatsoever).
 
So next I pop open some old sessions that are already mixed.  I was able to still play most sessions while set at 32.  This is with 40-60 tracks of audio with eqs and comps on most tracks with a few reverbs + delay sends + two Slate "Trigger" instances and one Slate "FG-X" which is supposedly very cpu intensive.   I did open one song with TONS of plug-ins that forced me to raise the buffer to 64 but even that song- the CPU was sitting at 40% with occasional spikes at 60% but NO WAY can I do that with this same system on XP.  To make sure I wasn't going crazy I switched back and booted from the XP drive and tried to open the same sessions-- could not do it without going to 128 or higher.  DPC latency even reads higher(?!?!) on W7 but the DAWs run smooth as butter.
 
So all those words just to tell you, if you've been like me- avoiding XP to "play it safe" you might want to take the jump.  I gotta say my entire Sonar experience these last few days have been the best ever.  I've heard about people with legacy systems seeing worse performance in W7 but with my system it seems that it just doesn't like XP.  Now my DAW is happy and that makes working a lot more pleasant.
 
Just thought I'd share. 
Take care!        
 
 

I'm moving to W7 64bit this weekend but will be keeping the XP partition until everything is installed (and resolved) properly.

I've purchased an Intel X25 SSD for the W7 install as I've been having SSD ambitions for a while.