Software

Worst Case Scenario: Windows 7 Upgrade Can Take 21 Hours

3:45AM September 13, 2009 | Dan Nosowitz

Now, this is extremely unlikely, and doesn’t correspond to my own experiences, but Microsoft says that in certain situations (crappy hardware, outrageous amounts of data, 32-bit install), the Windows 7 installation could take up to 21 hours to complete.

Chris Hernandez, a Microsoft Software Engineer, posted data on his blog tracking the time for both a 32-bit and 64-bit install for three different kinds of hardware and three different kinds of users. Most of the install times are totally reasonable (a clean install won’t take more than 50 minutes, even on a really lousy machine), but one sticks out: The Super User.

The Super User has 650GB of data and 40 programs to be transferred, and apparently that in itself disqualifies it from testing with low-end hardware. But a 32-bit installation of this scenario on mid-end hardware has a listed time of 1220 minutes, or just over 20 hours. Even the best case scenario with the Super User (high-end hardware, 64-bit installation) is looking very slow, estimated at eight hours.

My own installation took under an hour, even with 200GB of data to transfer, so these probably are conservative findings—that “high-end hardware” really isn’t so high-end, with only 4GB of memory—but now we’re curious. Has anybody’s Windows 7 installation taken an inordinate amount of time? Let us know in the comments. [Ars Technica]

Comments

  • matt

    September 14, 2009 at 9:43 AM

    pfft, anyone who could claim them selves as a ‘super user’ would be doing a clean install anyway, and wouldn’t need to worry about backing anything up except maybe their desktop and my documents folder.

  • DarkWolfhound

    September 14, 2009 at 5:07 PM

    I newly installed Win7 RC last night after a rather nasty virus/trojan destroyed everything. A few rather long pauses in the installation process between areas. But otherwise running in 1 hour. That was with a brand new hard drive, new partition, and fresh format. Installing under any other circumstances (alright, doesn’t have to be a new HDD or partition, but a fresh format at least) is just stupid. Your registry is just going to start off cluttered. And there is no guarantee your old programs will work if you are going from XP 32bit to 7 64bit. Cause that’s what I did.

    • Hyper

      September 14, 2009 at 10:13 PM

      I’ve already installed the RTM and activated it.
      (Technet Subscriber Baby!)

      My complete re-install only took a few hours, i have over 2TB of data.
      It’s actually quicker than a Vista complete install, i don’t really see how someone could come up with a 21 hour upgrade.

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