Conveniently Upgrade Windows 7 In 21 Hours Or Less–Guaranteed!!
While very unlikely Microsoft is admitting that upgrading to Windows 7 could potentially take you 21 hours depending on various different factors including your computers hardware, how much data you have on your hard drive and how many programs you have installed.
The chart above is from the blog of Chris Hernandez–a Microsoft Software Engineer. He did a number of install tests on 3 different hardware builds.
A truly nice feature of Windows 7 is the ability to upgrade from your existing operating system without losing your data and installed programs.
From my experience this chart is a little conservative. I fell into a the Super User group with High End hardware. I had around 450Gb of data and over 50 programs installed (including CS4 Web Premium, games like Crysis/Call of Duty 4, VPN software, etc). Hardware included 4GB of DDR2-1066 RAM, high end AMD dual-core clocked at 3.6GHz and a GTX 280 gpu with 128MB 1GB of RAM.
I was coming from Vista Ultimate 64-bit going to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit as well. From start to finish it took me just under 2 1/2 hours. After a few weeks of testing I was surprised that 100% of my programs worked after the upgrade including all of my games, VPN software such as Hamachi and CS4.
While 2 1/2 hours is alot of time it is nice to not have to reinstall everything and lose all of your saved data. If you are one of those people who like to reinstall Windows every so often–like me–then it will take less than an hour to install Windows 7 and probably less than another hour to get all of your programs re-installed like they were before.
Key word is ‘upgrade’; don’t ever do one.
Your 280 only has 128mb of RAM? I hope that is a typo.
I took the option of testing without upgrading. I like that the install only took a few minutes to accomplish. I’ve been testing the beta releases and so far i’m very impressed with windows 7. Too bad windows vista was like windows ME where microsoft too everyone for a ride for their money.
Yeah, Windows 7 has been wonderful for me so far. I am using the Evaluation Copy Build 7100. I expected the compatibility to be far worse. But nearly everything I’ve tried works, plus they have great compatibility modes. Games also run wonderfully. The UI is a bit resource intensive, but everyone should have at least 2GB of RAM at this point so it is a non issue for me anyway. Also, the menu bar in Win 7 is beautiful to say the least. Similar to Mac OSX, but with a Windows style (not as bad as it sounds).