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Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take Nearly a Day

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the just-sleep-on-it dept.

Eugen writes "A Microsoft Software Engineer has posted the results of tests the company performed on the upgrade time of Windows 7. The metric used was total upgrade time across different user profiles (with different data set sizes and number of programs installed) and different hardware profiles. A clean 32-bit install on what Microsoft calls 'high-end hardware' should take only 30 minutes. In the worst case scenario, the process will take about 1220 minutes. That second extreme is not a typo: Microsoft really did time an upgrade that took 20 hours and 20 minutes. That's with 650GB of data and 40 applications, on mid-end hardware, and during a 32-bit upgrade. We don't even want to know how long it would take if Microsoft had bothered doing the same test with low-end hardware. The other interesting point worth noting is that the 32-bit upgrade is faster on a clean install than a 64-bit upgrade, regardless of the hardware configuration, and is faster on low-end hardware, regardless of the Data Profile. In the other six cases, the 64-bit upgrade is faster than the 32-bit upgrade."

8 of 706 comments (clear)

  1. Only Vista by Stenchwarrior · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's assuming you were running Vista before. If you were running XP then you have to install clean.

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  2. How many times do I have to tell you, by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    *never* upgrade Windows! Always start from a clean disk!

    1. Re:How many times do I have to tell you, by ShadowRangerRIT · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's not funny, it's true. I've worked at MS, and while I personally tested a whole bunch of install scenarios (for a specific bundled app), upgrade always got short shrift and had the most problems. Yes, the most egregious errors were addressed, but most of the intensive testing happens on clean installs. Back up your files and install clean, unless you're really interested in finding all the corner cases.

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  3. Re:FUD by Idiomatick · · Score: 4, Informative

    Offtopic: As a professional Canadian I would like to point out that 'eh' does not need to get separated from the other words by a comma. It plays nicely with the rest of the sentence. In fact it works more like punctuation than a word.
    It can of course replace commas:
    "See that guy eh he's a hoser."

    Or question marks:
    "Hes crazy eh"

    And of course bewilderment:
    "EH?!"

  4. Re:Almost competing by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Informative

    Agreed! Good job to MS for being honest in the results they witnessed. At this point I've done quite a few clean installs and upgrades to Win7 on what I would consider low-end systems (early Pentium 4's, 512MB RAM) with my slowest install thus far being around 3 hours.

    And I have seen Ubuntu (one of my FAVORITE desktop OS'es) take no less than 8 hours to complete.

    Apples and oranges comparison.

    The various distros throw in an office suite, image tools, tons of other apps, servers, several browsers, compilers, interpreters, etc., and a system to keep ALL of them up to date. What does Microsoft throw in? wordpad and paint. No perl, no python, no php, no apache, ONE browser, no compiler, no package management outside of its' own applications ...

    And forget about trialing it off a bootable cd or usb key to see if it does what you want or breaks on your hardware ...

  5. Re:Why does user data make a difference? by abigsmurf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Because it moves the data from the each user's downloads, documents, images etc. folders to a temporary location. It then creates the user's folder structure for Win 7 and re-indexes all the files. If you've thousands of images that's a time consuming task. If you've not much free disk space, it'll take even longer.

  6. Re:Almost competing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You probably shouldn't be using a computer then.
    Honestly, I think you're full of crap.

    I believe him. But the problem was probably because he found some way to pull up Task Manager during the install and was killing various processes because he "knows what he wants". Seriously, I used to work with a guy who would kill installs in the middle of the process if he saw it installing components that he didn't want, or he'd refuse to reboot even though it said it needed to in order to finish the install process. And then he'd turn around and bitch about how the install "didn't work" and that it was "broken". The funny/sad thing about this is that these are fairly technical people that pull this crap when they should really know better.

  7. Re:Almost competing by LordKronos · · Score: 5, Informative

    Honestly, I think you're full of crap.

    Actually, I could very much believe he had problem. I had a problem where I got the Win7 RC installed on one machine, but another machine with a near identical setup (same model motherboard with same bios, same cpu, hard drive, etc) didn't work. It kept crashing during the install. Well, long story short, I realized one difference was that one was hooked up by VGA, the other by DVI. I switched the DVI machine to VGA and it worked fine. Apparently something bad was happening when the installer tried to configure the video on the DVI machine. I had to switch it to VGA, do the install, upgrade the video drivers, then switch back to DVI and everything was good.

    PS. If anyone is interested, the offending combination was a Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H with onboard nvidia 7100 paired with a samsung 2494HM LCD