Don’t hold your breath on a speed increase.

Windows 7, although a bit “peppier” than Vista, only holds a slight edge in speed over Microsoft’s much-beleaguered current OS, according to some recent benchmarking done by the folks over at PCWorld.

While there were a couple of tests that showed a nice speed increase for the forthcoming Windows 7, there’s just not enough proof there to make me feel like Windows 7 is going to be a marked improvement over Vista.

And what’s even more alarming is that since when PCWorld tested Vista vs. Windows XP, Vista was consistently slower.  And these marks from Windows 7 aren’t enough to convince anyone that we’re going to recoup that speed loss, giving the same people that hate Vista another reason to stick with XP when Windows 7 is released.

Granted, we’re still in beta stage for Windows 7, but that is wrapping up very soon.  The folks in Redmond need to pull it together and get this one right and they don’t have a lot of time left to tackle any lingering issues.

People overall hate Vista.  And many will be wary to upgrade to another version of Windows that doesn’t fix the issues that everyone had with Vista.

So, what happens if Windows 7 starts to tank like Vista?  Is Microsoft in trouble?  I’d love your thoughts, this could be interesting to see.