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Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take Nearly a Day
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."
No, I order from the dollar menu to get the same food mass for half the price of the regular menu items. I like the double cheese burgers and their flame broiled goodness...
You don't "upgrade" your CEO's PC. You buy a new one, you build it, you rip an image of his/her old PC, load it on a VM and copy what you need. You stop by his/her office the next morning and show them the new PC, introduce them to any new OS functionality they'll need to become familiar with, and ensure that all of their applications and data exist and work.
If anything goes wrong, you still have the VM of the old machine you can fire up on any box to keep them working till you fix the issue.
If you are running off with the CEO's PC for 20 hours (especially over business hours), you should fear for your job's security.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
After 14 years of living with Windows (holy pants, has it been that long?), I'm resigned to installing clean every few years whether there is a new OS or not - it's like a mini-upgrade I give myself, and best of all it's free (for very low values of own time and soul). Basically, in my experience, Windows is sort of like a giant ball of playdough rolling down a city street - it gets dirtier and heavier over time, less appealing and not so colourful, not to mention the used condoms and syringes it occasionally picks up, and so you need to break out a new batch of playdough once in a while. I'm not saying that this is right and that it's a reason to not get angry about these results, but can you imagine the tubs of crap that are being sloshed around in the bowels of your computer when your two-year-old Vista install is being digested for 20h? Are you going to get a pretty result, all clean and good with everything working? Will you be able to uninstall something that didn't quite make it when all is said and done?
Just start clean, it's easier on the conscience...
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
IMHO, if you're smart enough to be regularly using Linux, you should be smart enough to know that you should never "upgrade" a distro in-place. Keep /home on a separate partition, and do a clean install every time. It'll save you loads of trouble.
Actually, from my experience the "cruft" that supposedly gets Windows bloatier and slower, isn't as much a Microsoft issue, but the result of all those crap half-arsed 3'rd party installers and (more importantly) uninstallers, that placed crap all over the place and then forgot to uninstall it.
On my home machine I must have thousands of copy protection DLL's and drivers from all those paranoid game publishers alone, because God forbid that they don't place yet another obfuscated and untested driver on the DVD chain. You know, what with all the pirates running a cracked version without that anyway, God forbid that they'd stop punishing us honest paying customers instead. I must have such an unholy mix of StarForce, SafeDisc, SecuROM, and a few other things shat by the bowels of Hell, that it's got to reach either critical mass or sentience one of these days and start WW3.
And of course half the uninstallers forget to take _that_ crap out.
Then there are all the non-game things that just have to try to keep themselves resident, load their DLL's or custom libraries deep in Windows, and whatever. Last time I installed even Mozilla or Open Office from scratch (admittedly, that was way back in 2.0 days), they just had to try to keep themselves resident in memory, to appear that they launch faster than the MS alternative. Using the user's few RAM as your own private RAM-Disk has got to be an acceptable substitute to optimizing your own freaking code to actually load faster. But nah, the user surely has nothing better to do with his RAM than to help with out willy-waving, and will gladly buy another gigabyte just to help one more incompetent company brag about loading faster than MS.
Or here's an idea: how about using the standard widgets of whatever OS and window manager you run on? Now that ought to shave off the time of loading yet another cutesy skinned UI.
And then there's stuff loaded apparently for my convenience, that is "mine" only if I happened to be a marketroid for one of those vendors. Like EA's auto-downloader trying to stay resident in the tray, for no other reason than that apparently they don't want to let me download patches with a browser. Sun's Java trying to stay resident in the tray, just so it can pester me with reminders to get the latest Java 1.6... when I'm deliberately trying to test code that _must_ run with Java 1.4. Etc.
And then there's the occasional screw-up like an older version of McAffee antivirus which, I swear to the elder gods, actually couldn't cope with being installed in another directory than the default. So the first update actually installed a second copy, at the default location, but let the old one active too. So suddenly I had two antiviruses stacked in memory, and of course uninstalling only removed one. Took some grumbling and digging through Windows innards, just to get rid of it.
Then there's the stuff which plants its bits so deep in Windows, that you almost have to kill the host to get the parasite out. Goa'uld style. And I'm not even talking actual viruses and trojans, but antiviruses, and the occasional program which just has to bombard you with ads at all times. (And I'm still not even talking proper malware. An older RealPlayer version did just that... and that's why it was the last version I ever tried.)
Then there's stuff which just has to add some unneeded functionality, apparently just because they can't trust the default Windows implementation to do its job. I'm talking stuff like Creative adding its own disk change detector, never mind that Windows's auto-play works perfectly well as it is. Or that if I disabled that, I don't want Creative automatically starting to play anything either.
Then there are all the tons of custom skinned widgets, libraries that I need just for one single program (yeah, I sooo always wanted a display driver that needs .Net, thank you ATI), etc.
It's just sad. It used to be that you needed a virus to get your computer to crawl, while your hard drive icon and modem LEDs blink like crazy. For the last decade increasingly you only need to install legit paid-for software.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is typically how my Linux experiences go....
Linux Community: X works in Linux! And it's free!
Me: Huh, that's pretty cool....
Linux Community: Yeah and it's super easy. Easier to setup than Windows. And you'll never get a virus. And it's free!
Me: Wow, that does sound pretty cool...
Linux Community: Heard you had a problem with Vista's power management stuff? Yeah, you should run Linux - no problems there....
Me: Wow - that does really sound great...
Linux Community: Hey - Windows 7 is coming out - but look at this chart. It shows how much faster Linux is. And look, the install took less clicks and is much easier. Ant it's free! My Grandma runs it now. It's awesome.
Me: I have to say, that really, really sounds great....
Linux Community: I see you play WoW. I dunno if you know this but Linux can totally do that. Linux is like everywhere man. Why don't try it? It's free. It's everything Windows does, only free and less problems. It just works. Just download it man. Piece of cake.
Me: I don't know - that sounds great. I really don't like Windows; and I'd love to be able to play with the source of my OS....God Linux sounds great.
Linux Community: Oh - yes - it is! Here's a link man....go for it. Just download it and burn it. It's yours. Free. And just like Windows, only better. It does everything. Everything you want - it does. Better. Faster. Free! Try it. Don't be a chicken....try it.
Me: Huh - yeah - Linux seems cool but um...I'm having a problem. (The specific problem varies depending on the year I was trying it. Internet back in '03, RAID in '06, Wireless in '07, Installing in '09).
Linux Community: Oh yeah - that's nothing just do X (where X is something ridiculous like 'download it again')
Me: Umm yeah - so, that's not working for me. I still can't this working.
Linux Community: Did you read the guide? It's this page here - you should have read this before you did the install. It's really long and complicated and it will make you change your BIOS settings. It's called 'DO THIS BEFORE YOU INSTALL.HTML'. Go there, do it, try again.
Me: Umm - Okay. WTF? I don't know what any of this means but I just changed four things in my BIOS. But I still can't install.
Them: Did you verify the download? Use this MD5 tool to verify that the download was correct. I mean, you can't just trust a file to download correctly these days...it's really a gamble.
Me: Umm - Okay. I installed some program in Windows and it says it has the same number as what it should be...but it still doesn't work.
Them: Okay - well, go to this random guys blog. He has four pages of detailed instructions. You'll need to download a Windows driver and run this program that will, maybe get it to work.
Me: Alright - I spent FOUR HOURS screwing with this and I still can't get online unless I disable security on my wireless router.
Them: Well, just disable the security on your router. Yay! Linux works great!
Me: WTF? I don't want to disable my security. I want to be able to use it like it worked in Windows.
Them: Then buy a wirless router that works in Linux.
Me: Okay - which one can I buy off NewEgg that will work.
Them: Well, a lot of people have good luck with XYZ - but it depends on what chipset is used.
Me: WTF? How do I know what chipset is used?
Them: Well, buy it, and if it works, you'll know it's the right one.
Me: You want me to buy something that 'might' work, but if it doesn't work I'm SOL?
Them: Yup! If you don't like that, you can just buy a brand new PC with Linux installed from Dell!
Me: Is it any cheaper than the Windows version?
Them: Nope.
Me: WTF?
Them: Geez man, chill out. Linux *isn't* windows. It's not just going to magically work. Hardware manufactures don't support Linux, so you need to make sure, in advance, that your hardware will work.
You also can't expect Lin
Upgrading Windows is just asking for trouble.
The OS on my MBP, 10.6 is upgraded from 10.5 which was transferred over from an installation on a different notebook, which was upgraded from 10.4, which was cloned over from yet another notebook, which was upgraded from 10.3. I think that was the last clean install, although it could have actually been 10.2. So this OS has been upgraded through at least four major versions, run on three different machines, with two different major processor architectures (PowerPC and x86).
And it works just fine. I'm sure there are people running Linux with even more impressive provenances.