Windows 7 Upgrade very slow

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Posted by Jim Keir on 09 April 2010 06:01 PM

There's a lot of fairly useless information about this, mainly from deniers who insist that an in-place upgrade will never take more than an hour on any hardware with any amount of files. Sadly, not true.

Two reasons I found during a recent upgrade:

The IP Helper service was disabled

This is only supposed to be used for IP6, but without this on the upgrade will stall frequently. The solution is simply to make sure the service is started. If you're running an upgrade, then Vista is still running in the background. Simply hit the "Windows" key on the keyboard to bring up the start menu, then right-click on Computer, then Manage. Enable the "IP Helper" service.

Gathering files, settings and programs

Even after enabling the IP Helper service, this stage took over 24 hours to get to 44% before I started poking around some more. It seemed that the system registry was being written to a temp file with every change, which in my case was about 180Mb of file written and re-read for every key that got changed. The disk wasn't especially slow - hardware RAID in fact - but that's still a huge amount of I/O.

To fix this, I downloaded and installed the "Dataram RAMDisk" from http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk and created a 512Mb ramdisk. Once partitioned and formatted, I changed the system TMP and TEMP paths to point to the ramdisk. In the time it's taken me to type this, the installation has got to 83%.

Just remember to reset the original values for TMP and TEMP after the installation completes.

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