The Vista Team Blog has an interesting article on Vista's installation routine, more specifically on how long it takes to install Vista. "PC World got the conversation going on installation times in Windows Vista. While they quote Jim Allchin that Windows Vista can take as little as 15 minutes to install, my installs have been more like 20 minutes (still rocking fast), so I thought I would talk with David D'Souza who manages our Deployment and Installation team to get some more information about the different deployment scenarios and their installation time."
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Member since:2005-09-21
For me it's a slow install, and a slow OS. Mind you, I installed on a partition that already had a windows installation on it, however it was not an upgrade. All it did was move the old windows partition to a backup folder, and then install. Why this took so long is beyond me, but the install took well over an hour.
Then when I ran it, it was quite sluggish (latest build). Resizing the more complicated windows is slow and ugly (tearing effects) and everything is just noticeably slower than on XP (response times, application startup, etc). My hardware:
Athlon 64 3200
1GB RAM
ATI XPress 200M Video Card (DX9 compatible, 128MB dedicated RAM)
So not the highest specs, especially the video card (score of 2.5 in Vista), but this is an OS we're talking about here.. The computer does just fine playing Half Life 2 at 1024x768, and yet it chokes on some simple fading/transform effects on Vista? Seems odd.
Edited 2006-10-02 19:54
Member since:2006-06-28
I've been hearing this a lot from AMD 64 users - or basically any users with a more powerful machine than my modest one. It seems that everyone that has a faster computer than me ends up with a much slower Vista system than mine.
Did you install the x64 or the x86 version?
Member since:2005-07-06
My install trials (amd64 3300+, 1gig ram) with rc1 all took around an hour or so. I installed the 64bit version, on a blank partition. But I could live with this, since hopefully we won't need to install every day, what nerved me though was that after booting, with aero, everything seemed fast and nice, fairly low memory usage (I don't remember exactly but below 300 megs), then after a while, during a visual studio install and concurrently trying lots of things in the system (about every possible settings and such) it started to eat up memory, and after the install finished and exited, it still didn't finish so it wasn't the install's fault. After it raised above 800 megs it started to become painfully slow and it just ended up totally unusable. Another fresh install, now without any application installs, just using the base system, ended up the same after about half an hour use. That was the point when I removed it and started waiting for a newer build.
Member since:
2006-06-28
It takes a full hour on my AMD XP 2500+ (1GB RAM, ATI 9800XT 256MB), yet Vista is screaming fast once it's installed. Also, it takes an hour and a half to upgrade builds (for instance, Pre-RC1 to RC1) on the same system.