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Information Technology News Beware the 20 hour Windows 7 upgrade
Information Technology News Beware the 20 hour Windows 7 upgrade | Beware the 20 hour Windows 7 upgrade |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 26 October 2009 | |
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Microsoft Windows 7 has finally hit retail outlets and is available to the public. Microsoft is pinning hopes to 7 to repair the sour taste of Vista. Yet not all is glowing; users looking to upgrade from earlier Windows releases need to be aware of an unprecedented lengthy upgrade time.
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I’d previously installed the Windows 7 release candidate on an Acer Aspire One netbook and found the installation pleasantly simple. Admittedly, the Aspire One is a regular netbook with no special features, but nevertheless the installation was simple and swift. Once the RTM version was available I decided to take a desktop and laptop to Windows 7. Previously I’d had a Linux distribution on the Acer Aspire One so my Windows 7 installation wasn’t an upgrade but a fresh installation. Similarly, when it came to the desktop computer I was cautious because I’d previously installed Windows Vista when it was first released to MSDN subscribers. At the time nVidia’s drivers, Flash, and many other programs were incompatible with Vista and the result was a mess. Consequently, I’d made a multi-boot environment and the family continued using Windows XP while I had Vista and Linux partitions for my own use. It was thus natural for me to make a Windows 7 partition and install the new operating system that way. Again, it was a snap to install. There were no driver problems or software issues. The laptop was a different story, however. This machine was no slouch, being an ASUS Lamborghini with beefy specifications. The laptop was set up how I liked, loaded with applications and data running on top of Windows Vista. This time I chose to perform an upgrade to Windows 7, believing the end result would be a seamless migration to Microsoft’s new operating system, but with my programs and settings as they were. In contrast to the previous Windows 7 installations this upgrade took a surprisingly long time. It literally ran all night. Nothing in the Windows 7 installation process indicated that hours and hours would be required. When I booted sure enough my settings and documents were preserved but the system performed worse than ever. As I was to find out, this was not unexpected by Microsoft. |
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