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."

Only Vista

[Stenchwarrior]

That's assuming you were running Vista before. If you were running XP then you have to install clean.

How many times do I have to tell you,

[Anonymous Coward]

*never* upgrade Windows! Always start from a clean disk!

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

[ShadowRangerRIT]

It's not funny, it's true. I've worked at MS, and while I personally tested a whole bunch of install scenarios (for a specific bundled app), upgrade always got short shrift and had the most problems. Yes, the most egregious errors were addressed, but most of the intensive testing happens on clean installs. Back up your files and install clean, unless you're really interested in finding all the corner cases.

Re:FUD

[Idiomatick]

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?!"

Re:Almost competing

[tomhudson]

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.

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 ...

Re:Almost competing

[tlhIngan]

Protip for your friends: Get broadband internet. The actual Ubuntu upgrade doesn't take very long. Trying to download the new release over 56k might not be fun. But then, they could have just gotten a cd an upgraded from that.

Or pick a different mirror. I've seen Ubuntu mirrors (usually the default round-robin selects the slow ones...) end up rate-limiting the download. Instead of getting broadband speeds, you get maybe twice-dialup download speeds. Other mirrors can saturate a good link and then some.

Re:FUD

[SimonTheSoundMan]

However, most people will have 8x speed on their DVD-ROM drive. That's a theoretical transfer rate of 10.57MB/s, but in real world more like 3-4MB/s. Seeks speed also makes DVD-ROM's slow.

I prefer to use a USB powered 2.5inch drive caddie for portability. 500GB hard drive, maxes out the USB bus and seek time isn't really a problem.

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

[sexconker]

Many of those errors had to do with SP2 enabling DEP.

Re:Almost competing

[fmobus]

I call your anecdote a fake. My last ubuntu install was by far the longest I ever had, it consisted:

- less than 1 hour backing up stuff
- 4 hours repartitioning (I had ordered all the copy/move/resize operations in the worst manner possible :)
- 40 minutes tops with the installer itself
- zero minutes restoring backups - I had separated a /home partition

Re:Why does user data make a difference?

[abigsmurf]

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.

Re:Is it me?

[tomknight]

A comment (on the orginal article):

"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.

Re:Almost competing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Almost competing

[JCSoRocks]

This is probably close to the truth. I found the Windows 7 install to be dead simple. It's by far the fastest, easiest windows install yet. I was actually quite impressed. Of course, I was doing a clean install, not an upgrade. Upgrading your OS is just asking for trouble IMO.

Note: I'm talking about the 64bit install on a 2.67 GHz C2D with 4 GB of RAM and a 10k HDD. Although I also had excellent results on an ancient 2.4 GHz P4 with only 1GB of RAM. Obviously the latter wasn't nearly as fast as the former but it was still much better than doing an XP install.

Re:Why does more data mean a longer install?

[gparent]

Because of this: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1367735&cid=29414697 [slashdot.org]

Re:Almost competing

[LordKronos]

Honestly, I think you're full of crap.

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

Re:Almost competing

[LordKronos]

As I just posted here:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1367735&cid=29415807 [slashdot.org]

I was able to crash the installer just by hooking up my monitor by DVI. I'm sure it's a hardware specific combo, and granted this isn't the final code (RC1, not RTM...and I've heard microsoft does make changes between the final RC and RTM), but hopefully they got it fixed.

Re:Why does user data make a difference?

[DrinkDr.Pepper]

Um, 'move' commands don't actually move the files on your hard disk. 'Moving' a large directory of images shouldn't take any longer than it takes to rename it.

Re:Only Vista

[FraGNeM]

Clarification needed. XP Compatibility Mode in Vista is not the same thing as "XP Mode" in Win 7. Win 7 should have both modes, while the latter is a full-blown virtualized version of XP. It should run nearly any program that ran on XP -- it has far greater compatibility than "Compatibility Mode."

Re:Attention bearded folk:

[x102output]

I can almost guarantee no studio quality movie has ever been released using only linux for post processing.

Yes there are lots of FX houses using Linux heavily for post-production work. Maybe not "only on Linux" but it's definitely used heavily. Look at digitaldomain, they even release some of their own products for rotoscope and compositing. And they're Linux-only tools.

Re:Almost competing

[RobDude]

Careful - talk like that will get you flagged a troll around here :)

This was my last post on the Ubuntu forums that really outlines what I'd gone through trying to install Ubunut 9.04...

I know this thread is getting pretty long so I thought it might help if I consolidated everything into a single post so that people who see this don't have to read through all 4 pages of posts.

Ubuntu 9.04 Install Problems Summary

1. Download the Ubuntu 9.04 i386 ISO
2. Burn ISO to a blank DVD using IMG Burn
3. Reboot, try to install Linux
4. Install fails - I see an error message about ACPI and find myself at a command prompt.
5. Read - Edit BIOS - I'm directed to https://help.ubuntu.com/9.04/install...ios-setup.html [ubuntu.com] - I read and find that I didn't disable my 'Memory Hole' so I do that.
6. Reboot, try to install Linux
7. Install fails - I see an error message about ACPI and find myself at a command prompt.
8. Read - Edit BIOS - After visiting this and other forums, I found that by enabling AMD Quiet N Cool the ACPI error would be resolved. This information was not included in the 9.04 installation-guide linked to above.
9. Reboot, try to install Linux
10. Install fails - I see *no* error message - so that's a good sign (I think) - but I still end up at a command prompt.
11. Read - At this point, it seems like the install disk itself is the most likely source of my problems. I'm told to check the md5 of the download and the CD itself though the install screen.
12. Install winmd5sum And use this to verify that my download was correct (and it was).
13. Reboot, try to have the Ubuntu installer verify the disk.
14. Disk Check Fails The same as with the install, I end up at the command prompt. Unsure of what to do next I...
15. Re-Burned ISO to a blank DVD using IMG Burn on a separate PC, hoping that the burn was bad. As recommended, I use a low speed burn to reduce the chances of errors. IMG Burn 'verifies' that the burn was successful (I'm not sure if that means anything or not).
16. Reboot, try to install Linux (with the new disk)
17. Install fails - Same as before, no error message that I can see - just the command prompt.
18. Read the forums and end up directed to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions [ubuntu.com] - without really understanding the boot options in the F6 menu
19. Reboot - Install fails Same sort of fail as before, did this a bunch of different times with the different options.
20. Read the forums again. I end up at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/FakeRaidHowto [ubuntu.com] - I have three hard-drives two are configured in a RAID 0 though my BIOS. I'm unsure if the FakeRaid would impact the installer or not (I'm trying to install to the un-raided hard-drive).
21. Read the forums again. It's suggested that I try the alternate download.
22. Download the Ubuntu 9.04 i386 alternate installer ISO
23. Use winmd5sum To verify that my download was correct (and it was).
24. Burned ISO to a blank DVD using IMG Burn
25. Reboot, try to install Linux
26. Install fails - This time I end up stuck in an infinite loop. The text based installer says it can't mount the CD and to insert the CD, but the CD is in. My DVD drive seems to be functioning though - I used it to install Windows 7 two days ago without any problems.
27. Read the forums again. No suggestions, and without an

Re:Almost competing

[Bigjeff5]

It should be, they created a new imaging software tool (sorta like Ghost, but better in 90%+ cases) specifically for installing Vista, and it's the same tool they use for Windows 7. I use it in a corporate environment to push out custom PC images, and man is it slick. It will lay down an image in 1/4 the time a Ghost image will, and it has none of the downsides of the standard Windows setup install (like the mass amounts of custom .cab files and scripts to go through and pull components out of).

Re:Almost competing

[tomhudson]

Again, you miss the entire point - that the compiler does it once, at compile time, after which you can lose the compiler and still load and run the code directly. Hence, c is a compiled language. vb.net and c# are interpreted languages - even Microsoft admits they're interpreted. WTF do you think "JIT compiling" is? It's interpretation of the byte-code intermediate language put out by the so-called "compiler". Otherwise you wouldn't NEED a "JIT runtime + caching scheme" to get the still-shitty performance interpreted languages (including Java) give.

Or you could learn to use REAL compiled languages that don't need interpreters - like assembler and c.