For small businesses and consumers without enterprise deployment tools, a clean install of the aging Windows 7 can take a full day. And the problem's getting worse. Here's why.
On Monday morning, I began installing Windows 7 Pro on a clean virtual machine.
On Tuesday morning, more than 24 hours later, the installation was still not finished.
That, in a nutshell, is the unpleasant reality that consumers and small businesses face in sticking with Windows 7 as it counts down to the end of support, 1398 days from today.
The biggest problem, of course, is that Microsoft released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 on February 22, 2011, more than five years ago. Despite occasional rumors and hopes, Microsoft has never released a Service Pack 2 or even a post-SP1 update rollup. Which means that if you try to do a clean install using the most recent installation media, as I did on Monday, this is what you see when you run Windows Update.
Yes, 216 Important updates are available even with Service Pack 1 installed, and you'd have to be crazy to connect to the Internet without installing those patches first.
But that's not the worst of it...