Well for starters it's not x86, n00b
But no, not really - has a slightly... fresher feel to it - seems a little more refined than SP2 somehow.
If you can get it working with everything, it's fine though - I'm only missing Daemon-Tools at the moment, and I can do without that. GPL not working with the MOMO Force properly another issue, but I just need to tweak some FFB settings to get it back to normal.
1gb RAM here, and not noticed anything any worse than on x86... not sure what you mean by that...