It certainly is faster. That is the first thing we noticed about it. My wife looks at a lot of sites with pictures in it and they took ages to appear with the old computer, they coming zipping in at very great speed now.
Hmm. From what you say, I suspect that what you are noticing is mainly the fact that you have a new machine, and a clean operating system build.
Do you run a spy-ware checker on your old system? If you did not, then your browser (particularly if it's Internet Explorer) is likely to become packed with lots of little programs designed to monitor your browsing and feed the results back to advertisers. Did you have any extra toolbars on your old system which suddenly appeared? Did you have lots of pop-up adverts? All of this extra processing is what slows a spyware infected system.
If you had a spy-ware problem then moving to ANY new system would show a marked improvement. But if you don't try to avoid spyware, a new Windows system will gradually return to being just as slow. That's one of the ways Linux scores over Windows...