One Day Windows 7 Upgrade
If you plan to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7, you might as well plan on doing nothing else for a day. Preliminary reports indicate that some Windows 7 upgrades can take as long as 20 hours. If you’re a heavy Microsoft user with a large hard drive and with many, many applications, stock up on coffee, pizza or beer. Or just have one of those upgrade parties with your friends.
Over the weekend, several leading tech websites zeroed in on one alarming snippet of data that Microsoft tester Chris Hernandez published on his Technet blog: With enough data, on sufficiently underpowered hardware, Microsoft found that a Windows 7 upgrade from Windows Vista SP1 can take as long as 1214.86 minutes, which is (hang on while I fire up Calculator here) … 20 hours, 14 minutes, 52 seconds. Give or take a few milliseconds.
Ars Technica also reported:
The biggest thing that stands out about this chart is the very broad range of the upgrade time: from 30 minutes to 1,220 minutes. That second extreme is not a typo: Microsoft really did time an upgrade that took 20 hours and 20 minutes. That’s with 650GB of data, 40 applications, on mid-end hardware, and during a 32-bit upgrade. We don’t even want to know how long it would take if Microsoft had bothered doing the same test with low-end hardware.
Recommendation:
If you can, you are better off backing up your data and installing a fresh install of Windows 7. Total upgrade time: ~30 minutes.
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