Windows 7 RC Installations: 1 Fast, 1 Slow – No Idea Why
I installed Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) on two computers so far.
The first was an Asus Eee PC 1000HA netbook that had Windows 7 Beta installed on it. I performed a clean non-formatting installation where the Win7Beta and associated directories were moved to another folder that RC does not look at. This installation took, perhaps 30 minutes including moving the old Beta related files to an archive folder.
The second was an old desktop PC with an AMD Athlon processor. It too had Win7Beta installed. The Beta installation took about 30 minutes. The move to RC, however, took hours. It took so long that after about 90 minutes I had to leave to run some errands and simply left the PC on to continue the installation process. The update had finally completed while I was out running my errands.
Here's another oddity. Win7RC seems to be running as fast as Win7Beta on my netbook (Eee PC 1000HA with an Intel Atom N270 processor). However, Win7RC seems much slower on the AMD Athlon based desktop PC. I haven't run any benchmarks to compare the two yet. However, tasks like starting the Firefox browser seems much slower on the desktop running Win7RC compared to the same PC when it ran Win7Beta.