Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7

According to Microsoft, in some places, upgrading Windows Vista to Windows 7, may take up to 20 hours.

Chris Hernandez, who works in the Windows deployment team, claims on his blog that "One of the main goals with Windows 7 has been to be better than Vista. As part of the Windows Upgrade team we have tracked Windows 7 upgrade performance using Vista as our baseline comparison."

The blog states the best users can hope for is a one hour and 24 minutes download time; but so-called "clean" installs, where the user overwrites an existing edition of Windows to end up with the OS, but no former data or applications, takes less time, from 27 to 46 minutes.

Hernandez said the in-place upgrade times were obtained from lab machines in three different configurations - labeled low, mid-range and high-end - with three simulated users: a medium user, a heavy user and a super user. The profiles differed in the amount of data and the number of applications that were on the PC before the upgrade to Windows 7.

The medium user profile, for example, assumed 70GB of data and 20 applications; the super user profile, on the other hand, contained 650GB of data and 40 applications.

The upgrade performance tests used the metric of total upgrade time to gauge how Windows 7 upgrade performed against Vista upgrade. The tests were designed to measure total upgrade time simulating different user profiles (with different data set sizes, number of programs installed and settings) against different hardware profiles.

The blog concludes, with, "From the testing we have done, the results show that Windows 7 upgrade time is faster or equal within a five percent threshold to the Vista SP1 upgrade time."

Windows 7 features include advances in touch and writing recognition, support for virtual hard disks, improved performance on multi-core processors, and a new version of Windows Media Center, amongst others. The taskbar has seen the biggest visual changes, where the Quick Launch toolbar has been replaced with pinning applications to the taskbar. Buttons for pinned applications are integrated within the task buttons.

The new version is to be launched on 22 October and will be available in six different editions, but only Home Premium and Professional will be available for retail sale in most countries.

14/09/2009

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