Upgrade or clean installation of Windows 7?

During the development of Windows 7, Microsoft continuously tested the performance to see if the new operating system is really an improvement compared to its predecessors. One of these tests involved the speed of the upgrade process, using a Windows Vista Service Pack 1 installation and upgrading it to Windows 7. The results of this test were published this weekend by Chris Hernandez, one of Microsoft's software developer. A so-called "clean" installation of Windows 7 on a high-end system should only take about thirty minutes, while the most unfavorable scenario will require over 20 hours to install.

To give an impression of how long it takes to upgrade, there were four different reference situations, being a fully clean system, an average amount of data and software, a large amount of software and data, and an exceptionally large amount of both. Each of these situations had their installtion- respectively upgrade time measured on three different hardware configurations, namely low-end, mid-end and high-end hardware. The installation time was measured for both the 32-bit and 64-bit version of Windows 7. A more detailed specification overview of the used hardware can be found on Chris Hernandez' blog.

The overview shows the time required to install both versions of Windows 7 in their respective situations. It's immediately noticeable that the results are rather diverse: 30 minutes on a clean installation, and up to 1220 minutes when upgrading to a 32-bit version of Windows 7 while having a large amout of data on the hard disk. The lack of a low-end test for that tier isn't surprising, as it'd simply take too long to be reasonable.

Another thing that can be concluded from the results is that a clean installation of the 32-bit version is quicker than that of the 64-bit, regardless of whether you use a low-, mid- or high-end system. On a low-end system, the upgrading process to a 32-bit version of Windows 7 is always quicker than to a 64-bit version. In all other cases, an upgrade to Windows 7 x64 requires less time.

Tags: vista windows7

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