Here's what I want you to do. Stare at this page without reading it for twenty minutes. Every five minutes, smash your head into the desk. This will simulate both the pain and boredom I felt loading windows 7. 

 

Just this week I took a somewhat older iMac from 10.4 to 10.6 in about forty minutes. Just today I took a quad processor PC from Vista to 7 in about two and a half hours. I can not fathom how this can be so. Oh wait, yes I can.

 

First it does this "compatibility check" I neither want nor need. It tells me I must uninstall some program to continue. I look for said program. It is not installed. So I google said error message and come to find it might have been part of some other program and to run some clean up utility to take it out. In my haste, I didn't read the whole page where there were several other steps to follow to rid myself of this program that, again, is not installed. So I ran the clean up utility and started the upgrade. 

 

Again we go through the "compatibility check." Keep in mind that for the first 8 minutes of this so called check there is no hard drive activity at all. What is this process doing, exactly? It is not gathering data from the hard drive, obviously, so what is the point? Again it comes back with it can't continue. Of course there is no "I'll take my chances, just do it." button oh no. I have to go poking around some more and then, for the third time begin the upgrade. Finally it is happy. And of course, we couldn't somehow remember what the problem was, and just check for that, now can we? No, we must sit, for ten minutes, eight of which we do nothing at all. Then it slowly copies the files. Then it does some crap. Reboot. "gathering information". Reboot. "Expanding files" Reboot. Moving files. Reboot. "preparing desktop" Reboot. FINALLY DONE!

 

Did I mention I booted the OS X DVD once, waited 35 minutes, then booted into the OS (directly) and was done? No bizarre hanging at 60% while the HD churned away while nothing happened. Or again at 72%. No endless reboots. 

 

Here's a tip, Mickeysoft. Software is supposed to get better with time, like cheese, not worse, like sewage. Oh well, maybe at the end of 2012 Windows 8 will come along and make a believer out of-

 

Buhahahahahahah.

 

Anyway, painful day. Got home a lot later then I wanted, and hating everything. And by everything I mean Windows. It's not just that windows is bad, and it is, it's the fact that I can put one machine next to another and say to MS, look at how the install worked over on that machine. It took a fraction of the time and effort of your machine. Why do you believe your process to be acceptable? It's not. That machine had four processors. The fastest drive interconnect ever created by man (for home use, obviously, server or specialized hardware can be faster). It had two GB of RAM. (three?) Fully twice the computational resources of the OS X machine, which beat it up soundly. You are not moving forward MS, you are getting left behind, and you are wasting my time and other's money while doing it. FIX IT.

 

Remember Win98? I do. I remember it installing in about 45-60 minutes on 400Mhz machines. Machines 16x slower then that machine today. And don't give me any "it does more" crap. Because no, it doesn't. It shows files and launches programs in exactly the same way, and you can't deny it. The install would probably take about 10 minutes on today's hardware. In fact, I have a virtualization product, it might be interesting to do that test and see. 

 

Have at least three tomorrow, my forth said he would call tonight to tell me where to go, but he did not. I'll have to call him tomorrow.