Frogpipe, with your specifications you should be getting very smooth performance. Are you sure there are no bottlenecks elsewhere such as a congested drive, insufficient memory or running background programs? OS is not an issue, XP or 7. In fact, for the some tasks XP may be better than 7 as it uses less resources. My XP home server idles at around 700mb memory usage, while Win7 gobbles up a whopping 1.2gb.
Justin, excellent shots as usual. I'm also curious, why does it look like someone took a bite off the nose of that SD45?