David M Williams
Monday, 26 October 2009 16:33
IT Industry -
Development
Page 2 of 3
My grunty laptop had become sluggish to boot and Windows itself ran like everything was covered in molasses. It was an embarrassment to show people when they enquired about “this new Windows 7 thing” they’d heard about.
The Aero theme continually locked up forcing a reboot. Switching to a basic display theme got me further but still reported kernel mode faults and blanked the screen on a regular basis.
The experience I had with an upgraded Windows 7 installation was horrendous.
It wasn’t like that on the desktop, or the Acer. It wasn’t even like this on the
HP Mini 2140 netbook that Microsoft allowed me to use at Microsoft Tech-Ed last month.
Yet, here I was with a barely usable system – despite the combination of a powerful laptop and Microsoft’s most modern operating system.
I ended up reformatting and reinstalling from scratch. It was a nuisance to backup and restore data, to reload and reconfigure programs, but the end result was worth it. I
opted to go 64-bit this time and my fresh new Windows 7 environment truly was the best Windows experience I’d had on that machine.
These are my experiences, and normally experiential data should only serve as a guide, not a rule. Yet, when it comes to Windows 7 it turns out what I experienced was to be expected.
You see, the Windows 7 team blogged about their
experimentation and research into the length of time a Windows 7 upgrade would take.
The team considered several combinations of hardware and user profile. A medium user, for example, was considered to have 70GB of data across documents, music and photographs, and about 20 applications installed. They might have added 15 optional components to Windows.
On the other extreme, a super user was considered to have 650GB of data and 40 applications. I’d expect some iTWire readers to exceed these amounts too.
Hardware wise, the Microsoft team tested upgrades across hardware ranging from an AMD Athlon 64 CPU with 1GB of RAM and 5400RPM IDE hard drive, through to an Intel Core 2 Quad CPU with 4GB of RAM on a 7200RPM SATA hard disk.
Each combination of user and hardware was tested, in both 32-bit and 64-bit combinations, with the exception of a super user profile on low-end hardware. A clean Windows Vista installation was also considered, which had no further applications or user data loaded onto it.
How long do you think an upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 ought to take? Brace yourself.
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