Interesting Article - Windows 7 Upgrade: 1,220 Minutes

[Sassa]

Windows 7 Upgrade: 1,220 Minutes

That’s how much an upgrade from Vista SP1 can take


According to Microsoft, the maximum amount of time that a Windows Vista Service Pack 1 to Windows 7 upgrade can take is 1,220 minutes. Yes, Microsoft has identified a scenario in which moving from Vista SP1 to Windows 7 lasts almost an entire day, over 20 hours. Affected by this are what the Redmond-based company referred to as Super Users running Mid Range Hardware.

In its work to assess Windows 7 upgrade performance, Microsoft has put together user and hardware profiles. The software giant considered a Medium User one that has “User Data: 70Gb of data (documents, music, pictures); applications: 20 applications installed; OS Settings modified; Optional Components: 15 optional components installed; Windows Targeted Release: 5 Windows Targeted Release installed (WTR).”

The company’s Heavy User Profile is as follows, “User Data: 125Gb of data (documents, music, pictures); applications: 40 applications installed; OS Settings modified; Optional Components: 15 optional components installed; Windows Targeted Release: 5 Windows Targeted Release installed (WTR).” The Super User Profile involves customers with “User Data: 650Gb of data (documents, music, pictures); applications: 40 applications installed; OS Settings modified; Optional Components: 15 optional components installed; Windows Targeted Release: 5 Windows Targeted Release installed (WTR).”

When it comes down to Hardware Profiles, it considers Low End Hardware computers with 1Gb of RAM, with AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3200+ 2.2 Ghz, a Hard Drive of 320Gb 5400 RPM ATA-6 and running either a 32-bit or 64-bit operating system. For the Mid Range Hardware, the configuration that qualify have 2 to 4 GB of system memory, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 2.60 Ghz or Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40 Ghz, and 1TB HDD up to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s.

High End Hardware are machines with at least 4 GB of RAM, Intel Core 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40 Ghz, and 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s. Just take a look at the graphic on the left in order to get a more organized view of the data courtesy of Chris Hernandez, from the Windows Deployment team.

A Super User running Mid Range Hardware and performing a 32-bit Vista SP1 to 32-bit Windows 7 upgrade will have to wait a full 1,220 minutes before the process is over. Think this is much? Well, you’ll be happy to know that a Vista SP1 to Vista SP1 upgrade would take even longer, namely 1,305.72 minutes.

A Super User upgrading to 64-bit Windows 7 on Mid Range Hardware will have to wait 610 minutes, compared to just 480 minutes on High End Hardware, Microsoft informed. The same upgrade scenario on High End Hardware, but with 32-bit Windows 7 will take 675 minutes.

The fastest upgrade to Windows 7 Microsoft came across is 26.75 minutes, from a clean install of Vista on High End Hardware.

Source​

 

[Dark Nova Gamer]

Cool but..

...that a Vista SP1 to Vista SP1 upgrade would take even longer...

SP1 to SP1?

 

[dw96]

On this PC I firstly installed vista with no service pack and got about 48 apps in there, all updates and a lot of stuff I really don't need.
The clean install of 7 after vista took LESS THAN 12 MINUTES, I can't imagine how an upgrade takes... 1,220 Minutes...

Edit:
Celebrating my 150th post...

 

[Barman58]

During the early days of Windows 7 I did quite a few upgrades - It's the way a lot of people will install an OS so felt I had to have experience of the process to better support people.

The longest I can remember (both x86 and x64), was about 1 Hour 20 minutes. This was with the PC spec in my spec and 100+ apps installed.

The major difference from the scenario given by Microsoft is that No User data is kept on the system drive. All my data is on a separate partition which also includes a few sets of profile information (Firefox, Outlook, Lightroom, Etc).

It may be that the sfaety mechanisms for user data may be the thing that will increase upload times - though this is just my personal experience and opinion

Oh and Congratulations on the Post milestone DW96

 

[aappddeevv]

My home Vista system only took 30 minutes.

My work computer took over 20 hours then of course bombed out (I have posted my error messages for help). Apparently, the install program scans the entire install partition and analyzes then logs every file probably with a full buffer flush every single time. For filesystems with a large number of files (I had 3 million artifacts) this took forever. Quite disappointing that scalability was not taken into account. I think you can cut this down my modifying the install configuration XML file but you have to know the installer scripting to do that.

Obviously, a fresh install would go faster but then I lose all my applications and configurations. For now, I'll be sticking to Vista until I can cut down the install time and the error issues are resolved.