Wow - time goes by!!

Skofab · 15 Jul 2017

Have today upgraded 2 'older' laptops from 1607 to 1703. I did this using the Microsoft upgrade assistant.

The 2 machines are slow - so expected this to take some time. In the end this took 5 and a half hours each.Is this normal?
Surely if this was a clean install using a CD/DVD, this would take hour+ max. Why is it that everything windows 10 re updates and upgrades are so slow. Is there any future prospect that this may improve?

I have heard of people experiencing even longer upgrade time periods. I'm sure others will respond with some amazing time experiences

CmmTch · 15 Jul 2017

I've seen around 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours (including download of 18 to 20 minutes)

5 hours seems to be an extreme to me, but it is what it is, especially on older hardware.

The laptop I'm still waiting on WU for 1703 is a Latitude E6400. My wife and I both have Dell Latitude E6420's and both of those are on 1703 and took a couple hours each. The same with my desktop, all through WU.

Bree · 15 Jul 2017

Skofab said:

Have today upgraded 2 'older' laptops from 1607 to 1703. I did this using the Microsoft upgrade assistant.

The 2 machines are slow - so expected this to take some time. In the end this took 5 and a half hours each. Is this normal?

Surely if this was a clean install using a CD/DVD, this would take hour+ max.

My test PC (System Two in my specs below) is hardly a top end machine. The upgrade from 1607 to 1703 takes a little over an hour on that, but that's the time it takes when I use an install USB I made earlier with the Media Creation Tool.

What's your broadband speed? By using the upgrade assistant, each machine would first have to download the 1703 upgrade before it could begin the install. Now the download is about 4GB, so could easily account for much of your five and a half hours.

Let's be pessimistic and assume an install time of 1.5 hours, that leave 4 hours for download time. That would be consistent with a broadband speed of around 2.2Mbps. That's slow (mine's 15Mbps) but not unheard of, particularly in rural areas.

I prefer not to use the upgrade assistant, but to make an ISO of USB with the Media Creation Tool - that way you only need the one download, then install on as many PCs as you want.

Mooly · 16 Jul 2017

My experience of clean installing on my 10 (make that nearly 11) yr old Acer laptop is that it takes around 10 hours, all due to a buggy Wi-Fi driver. I've since discovered I can cut that down to an hour or so by hitting (to turn off) the Wi-Fi at the appropriate point in the installation. I then have to replace the driver......

Once I have replaced the driver the laptop runs amazingly well and is now running CU edition brilliantly.

cereberus · 16 Jul 2017

Clean installs are always much quicker than upgrades, as an upgrade has to analyse your pc in detail, and copy a lot of stuff to windows.old folder (can be many tens of GB) which can take a long time on an HDD.

You can easily be handling 10x as much data in an upgrade.

Actually, I would like to see an option to upgrade without creating windows.old, recognising that you cannot revert if things go wrong - you would have to double confirm such action.