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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!
.. 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.
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.
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?
Since when do they distribute Windows 7 Retail on a USB stick? This article is not FUD, it is the recorded time from installing from a DVD-ROM drive.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
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
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?!"
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?
Mmmm... Dollar Menu Burger King Food Mass.
I vote for the "plain fucking stupid" option...
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.
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.