I managed to figure part of the speed difference w/ the new OS. Though I had set it up to load the OS onto my 32gb solid state HD I use just to house my (current) OS it seems it instead loaded it onto a 500gb SATA HD that only has 18gb of room left on it which indeed has an impact on the speed it runs at.

I have found usin the SS HD makes my machine really cruise compared to havin the OS on a drive that also is a storage drive for files. Though I've read that this system isn't dependable (as in the SS HDs tend to lose their data over time) I haven't had any real issues with it doin so in the 4 or 5 months I've been runnin this way so far. Then again, that's not really all that long either, so ....

Though I usually disconnect the other HDs in my system when I load up a new OS, this time I didn't and sure enough it loaded the OS to a different drive than I had chosen