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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."
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
"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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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
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
There's a club for people like you. We have t-shirts.