Windows 7 upgrade could take whole day – so clean install!
Should you upgrade or do a clean install once Windows 7 hits? Which will take longer, which will cause more bother? I’m afraid those questions aren’t easy to answer because it all depends on what system you have, how much data you have saved and what applications you have running. Microsoft reports that one Vista to Windows 7 upgrade could take almost a whole day to complete.
Windows 7 is now little more than a month away from being released on General Availability. At this time, anyone who wants it will be able to purchase a copy of Microsoft’s new operating system and take it home immediately, assuming of course that the retailer has it in stock. The only question at that point is whether to upgrade your system or to back everything up and perform a clean install instead.
I would always recommend a clean install because although it’s more work, it means you have a nice fresh system complete with new OS to play around with. It also gives you a chance to spring clean your computer, deciding what really needs to be moved over during the swap from one OS to the next.
However, sometimes a clean install isn’t an option, or at least isn’t a very attractive one. In which case an upgrade is needed. Some upgrades can go very smoothly and not take too long at all. But others can be very painful and take an absolute age to complete.
Ars Technica reports on the test results Microsoft compiled while testing out the upgrade times from Vista to Windows 7. The time each upgrade takes varies by a huge margin. Tests were conducted on different typical user profiles, from people with very little on their computer to those with huge hard drives filled with data and apps aplenty installed.
As you can see on Microsoft Software Engineer Chris Hernandez’s blog, the upgrade times vary from just 30 minutes (no data and no applications on mid to high-end hardware) to an incredible 1220 minutes (650Gb of data and 40 applications on mid-end hardware). 1,220 minutes equates to 20 hours and 20 minutes, which is one hell of an upgrade by anyone’s standards.
Although it’s that upgrade time that stands out, it should be noted that most Vista to Windows upgrades took a reasonable 2-6 hours. But even for the people who fit those user profiles, I’d still recommend a clean install if it’s a possibility.
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September 14th, 2009
I installed windows seven on a computer from 2004. It took about 40 minutes with the following specs:
Pentium 4
768 MB ram ddr 222
160 gig WD hdd
Onboard video with intel chipset
Most people are going from vista to windows 7. So unless your upgrading from windows 98 to windows 7 then it might take a half a day. The best part is that windows seven downloaded all my drivers for that 5 year old computer. What specs does your computer have that takes it a whole day? I had to reinstall vista every 3 months due to crashes. Windows seven has never crashed on me and I’ve had it for 8 months. I’ve installed it on everything from netbooks to gaming desktops, and it never took as long as vista did or even XP for that matter.
September 18th, 2009
windows 7 isnt out yet…