An engineer at Microsoft has posted some interesting data estimating the length of time it should take different types of users with differing hardware configurations to upgrade from Vista SP1 to Windows 7. Microsoft assumed for the sake of this study that everyone would upgrade from Vista SP1 and did not compute the presumably worse times that XP users (that’s most of us) could expect. They said that Windows XP is a different system, Windows XP did not support 64-bit upgrades and they really wanted to track 64-bit performance and that Vista SP1 to Windows 7 is a valid upgrade path that exercises all upgrade code. In some instances Microsoft’s own estimate provides that a Super User with 650 GB of data will spend 1,220 minutes tapping their fingers waiting for their Windows 7 upgrade. In fairness a perfect clean installation clocked in on middle-of-the-road hardware at 30 minutes. Has anyone ever seen one of those perfect installations?

Microsoft via Engadget Ars Technica