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."

Comments

Re:Almost competing

[sbsheetz]

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.

Re:How many times do I have to tell you,

[neokushan]

Funny? Sorry, but I am an AVID windows user and I would never ever recommend "upgrading" to a newer version. To be honest, the upgrade procedure DOES work and it works quite well, but if you're going to change your OS, you may as well start fresh and avoid the potential errors that sometimes (although rarely) do crop up.
This also applies to service packs, I learned that lesson the hard way when XP SP2 was released. I don't know if anyone remembers but a fresh, clean install of XP with SP2 slipstreamed onto the installation disk worked perfectly well, but those who installed SP2 on top of Vanilla XP or XP SP1 ran into some very strange problems with program compatibility and such.

Re:Almost competing

[Praedon]

When I upgraded, it really wasn't much of an upgrade, cause I had XP. I used their migration tool, then double checked to make sure I backed up the right things, then did the clean install of the RC, since XP isn't upgradable in the sense that vista is. It took me about 1 hour for the full install, then about an additional 1 to 1 1/2 hours for the migration. All in all, it was very simple, straight, and to the point. My system for this box is a 3.4 ghz 32-bit P4 with 2 Gigs of Ram, and I had over 75 gigs in the migration.

Re:Almost competing

[xSauronx]

seriously. i installed it on an old, old athlon xp 1700+ box and the install went fine

now, i couldnt use it, because...well it turns out none of the hardware had vista/7 drivers. id been running linux on the box so long that i pretty much forgot about needing to find drivers for things *shrug*