Hello!

It's been over two years since I last visited these boards. I have to say, it's good to see some old faces/avatars again!
Code:
while(nostalgic())
{RefrainFromPrattlingOn();}
As you have probably gathered from the title, I have a few questions about CPUs. Would anyone be so kind as to help me? Here's the situation:

After having used my old laptop for a good five years so, I deemed it necessary to purchase a new one. It is a mid-to-high spec laptop: i7 Quad Core CPU at 2.70GHz (3.70GHz Max), 8GB RAM and I am running Windows 7 (64-bit). This is, theoretically, a huge improvement on my old system (Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.00GHz, 3GB RAM and running Vista). Due to the greater clock speed of the i7, I assumed that the newer system would run any given application faster than my old system, even if both laptops were only using one core. Apparently, I was mistaken.

A while ago I wrote a program that simulated the algorithm involved in a brute force attack. (I wrote this as a programming exercise for myself and, also, to prove to a friend exactly how infeasible brute force attacks are on your average computer.) Anyway, I thought I would use this simple program as a speed test for the two systems. I configured the program to cycle through numerical characters only and print the current value (starting at 0) after each iteration. The program was executed on both laptops at the same time.

Now, I'm aware that this, as a speed test, is rather primitive. However, it should give a general idea which system is faster, should it not? Turns out that the newer system completed loop iterations at about half the speed of the older system. Is it just me, or is that a little odd?

Anyway, this isn't a huge deal. I am just kind of curious about what is causing the speed bottleneck. I know that there are many contributing factors, but if any theorys jump out at you guys, then please let me know! There are some extremely bright and helpful people on these boards; I'm sure any theories you can come up with will be better than mine

Thank you for your time!
Necrofear

EDIT: Also, apologies about the length of this post!