It takes me about 2-2.5 on a normal install. I think this has more to do with the fact that I have a crap ton of stuff to install rather than experience/etc.
Boot Camp 3.0 (Older Drivers, Some of which I keep, some I don't)
Boot Camp 3.1
All Drivers
All Programs
All Windows Tweaks
Instead of dealing with all of that, and it's alot of tweaking, etc... I just made a hard drive image of exactly where I am after I finish that stuff.
Now it takes a 1/2 to get back to where I was just after I installed everything I wanted and tweaked my computer to it's best state.
Well... here's the thing... As I've explained before, I ran a single install of win2000 from 1999 all the way to 2006 when I put in XP and ran a single install of it all the way to last month when I decided to jump to Win7 ... The point is that you should not have to "get back to where I was".
A stable system should need no more than routine maintenance... Defrag once a week, Virus scans every few days, disk cleanup once a month... and aside from that it should
just work ... 2000 was rock stable for me from day 1. Xp cost me a couple hours of settings flipping and then was rock stable for the better part of 5 years...
People who use these systems for more than gaming or internet access, have to trust that what they do today will be there for them tomorrow. Office clerks and even IT pros don't want to run around fixing this and that... they want to simply use the machines.
Hobby level activity is different. Fanbois and geeks love to tinker, it's the thrill of the chase, another 20 3DMarks. Tweaking and messing with the computer IS the hobby. But for someone in an office to have to stop and do that, even occasionally, cuts into their ability to do their jobs and it does cost companies a lot of money when it happens... If your game goes down, you loose half an hour restoring from an image... If your financial data base goes down, you lose your company!
+1 Well said... I completely agree on that part
. Though I am risking my production system to Windows 7 (as I said earlier, I this is my primary rig, the one I made my money from). For a hobbyist, a down time is just another maintenance, it's just another time wasted... In an office/corporate scheme, when a client/server went down, means lost of revenue, example: several computers on sales department suddenly lost connection to the application server and some sales agents can't generate invoices for their clients, that means lost of/reduced revenue, bad for business, bad for clients, bad for the company.
Until now I haven't seen those horrifying network glitches/bugs/problems. This computer is connected to several corporate networks, some through VPN, others I need to manually dial... So far so good, I never lost any connection to any of my client's server. Though I have to be honest with you, my clients and I are using Linux/AIX/Windows[2000/XP/Vista/7] mixed environment, I never ever see any glitch. For the computer browser (the pane that is filled with icons from clients of the network) never work properly for me since 2002, so I gave up on it since then. I most of the time access clients using either IP address, OR FQDN, both work VERY RELIABLY, not like "Computer Browser" service.
One of my clients was running Windows 2003 Small Business Edition server, running on an IBM X3500, hosting an Apache instance, 2 Database servers, and acting as a file server... The performance was not bad, but not good either, up time was around 1 month, had to restart because some of the service somehow lost in translation (and the service in question is running, I can access it through localhost connection). After several excruciating months, I decided to move that server to SuSE Linux installation, and it perform admirably. Up time is always above 8 months on average (every 8 months or so, I always do a hardware checkup, so the servers must go down). Either Windows nor Linux server, I never lost connection to neither of them with my current installation of Windows 7.
As for home/work profile in 7, it's just a profile Microsoft made for network connections, it has list of to dos when you select it, like firewall rules... I use "Home" networking profile for my corporate connection, and most of the time had to modify the firewall rules so that my services can work... So I don't see the problem over networking...:sarc:.
As for the rampant behavior of "Windows 7 taking over my files - that made me unable to access the files from 'X' OS", this is just a matter of understanding how 7 works. 7 in a sense is very "strict", if it want an access to an object, usually it adds it self to the the ACL of the said object, but in rare cases, it replaces the ACL with its own causing your problem. To solve that, usually you just add your current user of the 'X' OS to the ACL of the said object (can be a file/folder/whatever). Windows 7 rarely "bark" unless you took over the ownership of the said object causing 7 to not able to access... Here's an example: I have my XP's "home" folder copied to my Windows 7. Then for some reason, I need to access the real XP home folder (in XP installation). 7 said I can't access it, because it doesn't have sufficient permissions to access the said folder, it asked for permission to add the required permission to the folder, I clicked OK... I can access my XP's home folder on the XP installation through 7. I checked the "Security" tab, to make sure that it didn't took over/overwrite the security/ownership of my XP's original home folder, and it didn't... After that, I restarted, logged in to XP, everything was normal...
If you have issues of such nature, I'll gladly help... I personally never saw these problems you said, though all I do is use the "classic" implementation of Windows networking (access SMB/CIFS share as it is, and essentially must login every time I want to use a resource off other "servers"). I never ever even consider Homegroup. I know somehow someway it's a "tacked on" implementation, though I never bothered to learn what goes behind the scene, I think it's not time well spent... SMB/CIFS works, why bother Homegroups?
zzz2496
