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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."
Good going MS! Add a few hours to that and they might beat the time it took for a few people I know to upgrade Ubuntu!
That's assuming you were running Vista before. If you were running XP then you have to install clean.
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when you consider the lifetime of misery that follows?
This reminds me of a funny bit from "The Three Stooges" that goes something like this:
Moe: I'll take this end ...and I'll take the end in the middle!
Larry: I'll take that end
Curly:
Just so you know, there isn't an "end" in the middle. There is "low-end" and "high-end" but there is no "mid-end." That would be medium level, mid-grade or average or something else.
Mid-end is almost as jarring to the grammar nodes of my brain as "incentivize."
*never* upgrade Windows! Always start from a clean disk!
Installing win7 from a usb stick on a medium computer took me 20mins or so maybe a little less. What is the point of bringing this up. Its like.
'Well the ferrari enzo is pretty shitty. It's 0~60 really drops when it has bare tires and is driving up a 70 degree slope in the rain.' (Car analogy just for you guys.)
If it will likely never happen that way, who gives a flying fuck?
.. the Windows 7 Drinking Game exists. Let's add:
* One shot every thirty minutes the install or upgrade process takes.
* One shot if you have to start over.
* Drain the bottle if it ATE YOUR GODDAMN DATA.
Any others to add?
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I bet you're the kind of person who goes to Burger King and orders 2 Whoppers Junior, aren't you?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
You could never get laid ever again in your entire lifetime!
Actually this one was quite a realistic scenario ... let's try another one:
You could be eaten by a grue within the next minute!
I have never been a fan of "upgrades" as they tend to be a bit buggy. I did a clean install of Windows 7 x64 the other day just to try it out over XP and I have to say that I am impressed (well over XP that is). It did not take too long, but then again, I would click something...go back downstairs to watch football with my tasty beverage...go upstairs at the break...rinse and repeat.
I know "upgrades" are usually cheaper - but maybe they should just give you a rebate (or immediate discount) when you send in your previous licence number - and force you to do a clean install. To help those who are not so knowlegeable - maybe you include an idiots guide to backing up files using an external HD/DVD or something like that. That should be enough for even the moderately technical person. For the idiot - maybe you include a token voucher ($20 or so) that can be used at a big box partner to help cover the cost of the upgrade for you and recover your data.
Just a thought...
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
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
"the process will take a bit 1220 minutes"
OMG, if the clean install is something like 4.8GB then that would be 4.13175854 * 10^10 bits, times 1220 minutes/bit equals 95 840 997.1 years!
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
What the hell is the upgrade doing to all that data... identifying all the non-DRM'd illegal media and sending a list of it to Microsoft?
I don't get it.
It took me a day to go to Snow Leopard
1. Back up system .1 release came out
2. Install Snow Leopard
3. Do a "migrate" of my old data to the new OS
4. Discover that all my apps crashed!
5. Restore the system to the backup I made in step 1
6. Repeat process when the
WTF? According to the referenced MS blog post, the 650Gb is user data. Why in the world would upgrading your OS and installed apps depend on the amount of per-user data you had? Why is the system updater even bothering to look in the per-user directories?
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
Or you just load the VM fullscreen at startup.
The boss is happy because he has the newest PC in the office AND everything is exactly as it was before, and you're happy because you didn't do any real work. win-win situation.
He's making a joke about grammar pendantry.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Hi. I work with small businesses. I'm here to explain to you why Windows 7 will dominate this market for the foreseeable future, and why Linux will not. It is my hope that you will get some inspiration to create products that I can sell to customers besides file and web servers.
1. Windows 7 does not force a user to edit any configuration files for any normal desktop user. I cannot stress how important this is for most small business owners. This is not the 1980s. No one has any interest in programming or fiddling with tens of arcane text files to get work done. They just want to turn on their computer, use it to process data, and then go home. If you claim that this is not the case, you're just ignoring reality.
2. Windows can run on most hardware. It can run most applications. This means it's cheaper to deploy than Apple solutions, and you can actually do something once the OS is installed.
3. After years and years, there is still no multi-user, end-to-end solution for creating quotes, orders, and invoices, that integrates with an accounting solution to keep track of payables and then print checks to pay them. You are being beaten by a company, ironically called Intuit, that just switched from a flat file system in 2006.
I realize a lot of this has to do with driver support. I realize most of you don't care if your software is popular or not. I realize that you will reply with some alpha and beta stage software which you think can do the job, but won't.
However, bashing Windows is a complete waste of time. I'm not saying I can do better, but I am saying that you need to stop pretending that you are doing any better. The future is not going to be using a computer like a computer. The future is turning a computer into an appliance that Just Works Every Time.
Don't get me wrong - newer distros are amazing. Synaptic is like a revelation of the way things should be done. OOo is so close it's almost unbearable. I'm learning Python on the Linux side because it's easier than trying to configure windows for the same task. But you've got to start expecting more out of yourselves than of your end users.
So let me be your James Carville for a moment. My big banner says:
1. Users are not programmers
2. It's the applications, stupid!
3. Don't forget about accounting software
4. Laptops are people too
I have an immense amount of respect for the people who work on these projects, because you all know a hell of a lot more about computers and computer science than I probably ever will. However, I am pleading with you to abstract your knowledge so that everyday people can use it. Otherwise, it's not going to do the world much good.
Mmmm... Dollar Menu Burger King Food Mass.
"The upgrade process (be it Vista or 7) copies the data out of the current \Users, \Program Files, and \Windows directory to a temporary directory. It then kills those directories and lays down the new OS. After that, it copies all of the data back (well, probably a move operation -- but it still takes a long time). You can watch it if you do a Ctrl-F10 to bring up a command prompt during the upgrade process."
(Seems it's actaully shift-F10)
Kind of makes sense really, in an ugly sort of way.
Oh arse
I vote for the "plain fucking stupid" option...
But it seems that few here realize the reason why. It's the same reason why SP2 for Office requires you to "reset your Outlook profile" back up. The reason? Because for the first time this 'upgrade' actually takes it's time and does it right, instead of casually overlaying new APIs and layers on top of old ones. It reindexes, reworks, revamps, cleans out the old, and carefully puts in the new. I've done multiple clean installs of Win 7 (RC1 and RTM) as well as upgrades from Vista (and prior version of Win 7) and I have yet to run into an issue on either one. Drivers work, apps work, settings work, everything is where it should be and runs practically like it was installed fresh. Although the bitching is understandable and expected due to Microsoft's reputation in this department, it is unwarranted when considering Windows 7 merits alone. I think a lot of you guys will be pleasantly surprised. Btw.. It's taken a few hours, but never in the double digits. I think this is a worst-case-scenario more than anything else.
Seriously, who here hasn't charted out the $ to calorie ratios of all the menu items at popular fast food chains? They even make it easier by putting the calorie listings on the back of the place mat at mcdonalds!
What accounting system?
There is a solution for that too. Better know as Fusion or Parallels...
There is also a 3rd, cheaper, solution: Don't pay for OSX and Windows when all you needed to begin with was Windows.
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.
I've got a Dos disk image punched into punchcards somewhere.
I was bored in class one day and found you can hook the punchcard writer into a rs232 port. ran through the schools stock of punchcards in 1 hour.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Seriously, who here hasn't charted out the $ to calorie ratios of all the menu items at popular fast food chains? They even make it easier by putting the calorie listings on the back of the place mat at mcdonalds!
It isn't worth it. The free sachets of mayo win every time.
Wow, Where do you get one of those 42,000 RPM drives?
At the store two blocks down the road. They are also having a special on a free zero with every purchase!
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