Startling News: Windows 7 Upgrades Could Take Over 20 Hours To Complete

Upgrading your operating system using the “in-place” approach has always come at the cost of some performance and stability, but never would we have imagined that it could take up to 20 hours to complete!

According to a new study released by Microsoft software engineer Chris Hernadez, upgrade times can range wildly depending upon your hardware configuration, and the amount of data it needs to migrate during the install. The worst time recorded during their testing was a whopping 20 hours and 20 minutes for a “Super User” that had roughly 650Gb of data, and about 40 applications installed prior to the upgrade. This might sound like a pretty niche scenario to some of you, but I imagine at least a few of our readers (myself included) fall into this category.

A quick look at the chart reveals that even “Medium Users” are facing upgrade times that are about 3-4x longer than a clean install.  If we haven’t talked you out of “in-place” upgrades by now, we probably won’t be able to, but at least the chart shown above can help you figure out how much time you need to set aside.

[Via MaximumPC.com]