Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Monday 14 September 2009, 10:55 AM
Windows 7 upgrades can take almost a day
The time benchmarks for the installation of Microsoft's upcoming operating system — due for release next month — were conducted by the software company's Windows Deployment team. In a blog post on 2 September, team member Chris Hernandez said the objective was to "determine whether an upgrade from Vista SP1 to Windows 7 was within a 5 percent threshold faster than an upgrade from Vista SP1 to Vista SP1".
Hernandez explained that an 'upgrade' from Vista's first service pack to the same release was chosen as the point of comparison because XP is a "vastly different operating system compared to Vista", XP does not support 64-bit upgrades (one of the main metrics in the tests, alongside 32-bit upgrades), and Vista-SP1-to-Vista-SP1 is "a valid upgrade path that exercises all upgrade code”.
In the tests, 32-bit upgrades were always faster than their 64-bit counterparts. The shortest times were recorded when performing a clean installation on mid- and high-end 32-bit systems. At the other end of the scale, the tests showed that 'power-users' — those throwing 650GB of data and 40 applications into the scenario — can expect an upgrade time of 1220 minutes (or 20 hours and 20 minutes) when upgrading a 32-bit system. The same users would take half the time to upgrade their operating system on a 64-bit system.
"The "super user profile" is not a normal user," Hernandez wrote, adding that such a user profile was "not representative of what most 'regular' users, who typically have a much smaller data set and would therefore experience a much, much shorter upgrade time".
A 'medium-user' with 70GB of data and 20 applications would, on a medium-specced, 32-bit system, take 115 minutes to upgrade from Vista SP1 to Windows 7.
PreviousComments on this post
This comment has been deleted at the users request
Well. That's impressive.
Just installing Win Xp Pro SP2 to SP3 took about 55 minutes when I did it recently (Sunday very early AM). So they really haven't improved the install time at all. That's actually pretty sad considering that nobody intelligent about Windows leaves it set to the defaults or goes without the service pack when its obvious it needs to be installed. Its also sad considering the big bump up in speed and performance improvements the hardware needed to run Vista has compared to XP.
Microsoft has just made the argument for cloning and imaging systems instead of doing OS re-installs. An imaging "application" should be in Windows. I'd give up mediaplayer for that.
What has the amount of data a user has got to do with the upgrade time. Unless of course M$ is downloading it all.
Why do these "Windows Upgrade" stories coming out of Microsoft always avoid any mention of "upgrading" from XP to Windows 7? Do they simply not want to talk about it, or not want users to think about it or be aware of it? The simple fact is that a huge number of Windows users refused to accept Vista and are still running XP - both individual and corporate users. IF those users decide to change to Windows 7, they are going to have to do some sort of "upgrade", and I suspect that they will be extremely disappointed when they find out that there is NO direct upgrade from XP to Windows 7 possible. They will either have to upgrade XP to Vista first and then upgrade again to Windows 7 (I suppose that makes sense, you have to have a pig before you can put lipstick on it), or they will have to backup their data and make a clean installation of Windows 7 (just buy a new pig with lipstick already on it).
jw
Any PC user / admin with at least half a clue about what they are doing should be perfectly capable of doing either a backup of their old environment or re-partitioning their drive to dual boot for the interim period. MS provide file & settings transfer wizards to assist with migration tasks, and for those admins with lots of machines they should be imaging a pre-configured installation for faster distribution.
Periodic re-installation of Windows from scratch is generally a good housekeeping task, especially with XP. Just read the thousands of blogs on XP system file corruption / failed installations etc.....
Obviously JW hasn't used Windows 7 for any period of time since the main benefits over Vista are under the hood in terms of performance and stability, and NOT visuals. Sounds perhaps like you are an anti-MS Mac user anyway?
It's easy to re-partition and dual boot XP and Windows 7? Can you please describe exactly how easy that process is, please?
In fact I am not a Mac user at all, and never have been. I am indeed an anti-MS former Windows user, who got burned one too many times by Vistaster, even though I said publicly that I kept trying because I liked it and wanted it to work properly on my computers (check my early blog entries here for this), and who got sick and tired of Microsoft repackaging bug fixes and selling them as "new releases", whether it be for Windows, Office, or whatever else.
Last, but certainly not least, in what universe is it considered acceptable practice for an operating system to need "periodic re-installation" in order to continue to function properly and to remedy "file system corruption / failed installations etc..."? I can think of one operating system which requires that... Windows... I'm still trying to think of another. The majority of the systems that I manage have UPTIME of more than 1,000 days (that's over three years without a reboot), how many times would we have had to shut them down and perform "periodic re-installation" if they had been running Windows?
jw
vista to sys7 well it crashed my p/c and f.....ed my tft monitor now were told theres a bug that can give you the blue screen of death i,m definetly not buying it i,ll bet laughed his socks off when he heard he,d damaged my rig because it was a copy now i realise it wasn,t the copy it was win 7 its another heap of s...t what they? they want us to test and pay for this info has been received today from ulesses online....Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090914 Ubuntu/9.04 (jaunty) Shiretoko/3.5.4pre - Build ID: 20090914164211 you can visit the site for more info
This comment has been deleted at the users request
Well I've never believed any of the Microsoft's drivel about not being able to provide 64bit upgrade path for both win XP to vista and now the win 7 systems, and I never will.
I'm a big fan of cloning technology's especially considering I've made substantial use of them for the last several years, and I believe if some thought had being put into it, win 7 could have easily incorporated this technology to assist in migrating over to win 7 platform from win XP.
An upgrade solution would be very welcome here, but even so I won't be moving over to 7 until all me applications support it.
shame that pro win 7 user,s delete oppositions comments shows how self rightious some idiots are
@lezlow, Blog writers and users on this website are only allowed to delete their own comments, not anyone else's.
@jawatson
Microsoft was very straight forward with the message early on that there would not be a direct upgrade path from XP Pro or Home to Win7.
From having experienced Visaster for over 6 months, and having been on the end of a XP to Visaster upgrade attempted by the IT dept, I would NOT suggest attempting an upgrade from XP to Visaster and then to Win7.
The symptom of a XP to Visaster "upgrade" is that all of your Documents & Settings folders get copied over into Users and then the original folders all get emptied.
Whatever registry entries made by the Admin account that limits the service account in the XP HKLM are basically hosed.
Any folders in the root of C remain but if the folders contained installed programs, they are there but not installed in the new OS.
Program Files get pretty thoroughly messed up.
The file and access permissions on all of the XP originated folders and files get totally squirreled up. The Administrator account has to take possession of all the files and then deal with resetting the ACLs.
That also happens with all removable media. Its possible that a CDR or USB device with the admin account denied access and Read-only permissions for a user account ends up with a device that can't be read on the Visaster system.
My biggest complaint with Visaster is that Explorer periodically goes off and gets wack, the screen goes white and after a period of time that seems totally arbitrary comes back like nothing has happened.
Just as i had feared then at the very least means a total reinstall, after achieving not having to do that for seven years oh well.
Yeah, this time going from one Windows OS (XP) to another (Win7) IS easier by just starting with a blank drive.
Once they did that, going from Visaster to Win 7 Beta worked OK. Everything landed where it should have and the drive folder arrangement remained stable and the ACLs or file and folder permissions didn't get mangled.
Later I did an install of Win7 Beta on a blank drive that was fairly painless and only took about 45 minutes total. I blogged about it a while back.
Ubuntu 9.04 versus Visaster is a no-brainer, Ubuntu wins.
Ubuntu 9.04 versus Win7 is fairly even as to installation ease. Operationally Win 7 has a lot of the irritations of Vista but it is a better OS than Visaster. But I don't think of Win 7 as better than Ubuntu.
I especially like the fact that Ubuntu can read the NTFS partitions made by XP Pro and Win7. That allows me a lot more flexibility compared to running either XP or Win 7 simply because Windows can't read the Linux ext partitions.
Add Samba to the mix in Ubuntu and there is actually no need to run Windows at home except when I need to write dotNet code in Visual Studio. (Mono might soon take care of that as well.) At work I have other Windows based tools that have to be run under Windows so its not so clear-cut an answer. Running them in a VM hosted on Ubuntu will eventually be the mode I'll be using.
Yeah virtual machines will help take care of a lot of loose ends for all systems, I think win 7 is a step in the right direction for them but I think we'll haft to wait a few more generations to see it bare fruit.
Hopefully fingers crossed ms will learn something from the open source influences they have come into contact with.
