If you are installing Windows 7 and are having problems: Read this >>

[BlueJazz]

Sorry to wake you up at 2 o'clock in the morning. (That screaming you heard was me)
Anyway.....

On some high end motherboards, you need to disable the floppy controller.Windows 7 installer will keep searching for files on Floppy and "drag" like a snail. (Yes, some of the new boards have Floppys...like Asus M4A78T-E)

Again...on some motherboards...take out any ram you have that is over 2 gig. After installation it's cool to put the chips back.

And again..on some systems, if you're running a high end Video card (over 256 meg), take out card and run the on-board Video. (again the installer seaches for files on the ram chips..why?..no idea)

These steps will allow the neighbors to sleep late at night. :)

[Statistical]

1. Sure. You base these conclusions on what?

Searching for files on video ram? Of lets say that was true.
Memory bandwidth for video cards is in the 20-80 GB per second range. So even if you had 1 GB of ram it would take a fraction of a second to read all of it.

I installed Windows 7 on motherboard with floppy controller (virtually all still have them for legacy support), 8 GB of RAM, and 1 GB video card. Nothing "dragged" like a snail.

I don't doubt you are having issues but I think you jumped the gun with your "conclusions".
Maybe posting at 2am is not a good idea?

[BlueJazz]

2. Nope...this is after 3 days of talking to Customers of mine ...

...several techs and tons of forums. Type in "Windows 7 slow installation"....you'll get a LOT of fustrated posts.

I've installed ..mmm....15-20 windows 7 and only 1 has had trouble...besides mine.

I know the floppy and video card, ram thing does not make a lot of sense but on a few boards it does seem to be a problem.

All I know is that when people did one or all of the things I posted the Install was easy and quick.

It MIGHT be ...or apply only to New Booards ..I don't know...and don't care.

And read my post again...I said SOME boards.

[Occulus]

6. My roommate and I both have it installed

It installed fine on my rebuilt machine. Quad core, two video cards, 4GB RAM. The installation process actually took a lot less time than I thought it would However, on my roommate's computer (quite a bit older than mine), it dragged like a snail and neither of us knew why. The install took nearly 45 minutes just to extract the files from the disc, which I know for a fact is a good burn of the RC. Now I have things I can test the next time he installs it on that machine.

This smells like a "legacy" hardware issue. It happens; for example, Ubuntu doesn't like something about my motherboard related to either the motherboard's SATA controller or to laptop power saver features (or both?), and I need to add pci=nomsi nolapic noapic to the boot line.

[hobbit709]

3. I've installed it on 5 systems so far

Ranging from 1.73 GHz Celeron M laptop to 2.8GHz Athlon X2, system RAM from 1 to 4 Gb. Two with floppy drives installed and one with 512Mb Nvidia card. It took 30 minutes on the slowest install and 20 minutes on the fastest No glitches, no problems.
It took longer to tweak the settings afterwards than to do the install.

[BlueJazz]

4. oh...I usually have no problems with the installation. The vast majority..

...of Computers will accept it easily.
But speak of the devil..a Customer call me awhile ago and was having a nightmare with it. He said when it finally installed (3 hours..Geez) it refused to boot up.
He took out the battery and let it sit for 20 minutes...plugged the power and put the battery back in and now the computer is dead as a rock. And this guy is fairly Computer savvy.

Damn..I hate trying to fix shit like that..it can turn into a 4 hour ordeal..You're not sure if Maybe the bios was written to or it was just a coincidence ..and nobody else can absolutely say for sure simply because they (probably) have not seen this sort of thing before.

...Aggg!

[MyNameGoesHere]

5. You got something wrong with your source

image i think. I am doing a mass roll out of close to 200 systems and these are upgrades, with transfer of user data and they are on average 1 hour per re-image.

[BlueJazz]

7. Are they Office Computers ?? IE: Not 300 dollar boards and 250.00 Processors?

If they're the same kind of ..ahh..stuff ..that I've installed to then you'll have no problems.

I've had no problems with ordinary consumer products....just good computers.

[MyNameGoesHere]

9. I am not sure what

you mean by that. They systems from 0-5 years old, laptops, workstations and desktops. Plus about 20 vmware which does have some issues but nothing overly complicated. We don't buy junk so I am not sure what you mean.

[BlueJazz]

10. Not insulting you or your computers...just saying that the problems I've encountered...

...with "7" is on computers that don't have everyday boards and parts...like a ASUS P4T-E that (today) I had to "mess" with the bios 4 times before 7 would install at a decent speed. plus the fact that the customer had a turtle beach Montego sound card that will not work with 7. (No drivers yet for 64 bit)

Which I should have known but..I'm only a simple tech.

[RoyGBiv]

8. I'm gonna say something ...

First of all, I would like to thank Blue Jazz for offering this bit of advice and insight. This is precisely the kind of thing for which this group was created, and the fact people have long offered such tidbits of information is why we continue to be relevant.

Why this advice was met primarily with criticism might be confusing to me if I didn't actually understand the reason why. But I won't get into that.

I don't use Windows as my day-to-day operating system, as some of you know. But, I do have an XP partition I use from time to time. I attempted Vista, hated it, and avoided it afterward. I'm giving Windows 7 a chance at the moment, still not liking it (because it really is little more than Vista with most of the show-stopper bugs worked out, and the bugs weren't why I disliked Vista), but trying to learn it and its quirks.

I've installed it on three systems now, which is not representative and not comparative to the sampling the Windows experts posting here have, but I've had my experiences nonetheless. All these systems were built by me, so I knew the hardware very well.

Two of the installations went through without a hitch. I was quite pleased, and the people who run the machines are as well.

One of the installations was a nightmare. Without going into the song and dance, BlueJazz's advice here actually solved one of the main problems I was having. I followed this advice, and now all is well.

I have no idea *why* the advice worked, just that it did, and that's good enough.

So, thank you BlueJazz.

[BlueJazz]

11. Thank you Roy. The problems I've had (as in the other post) seems to be with..

"High End" boards (AMD3 etc) that use DDR3 and 64 bit.

I'm suspecting 7 sees that some of the hardware (sound card or video) as completely incompatable and Freaks out. :)

But again, there's no set pattern to it all. Kinda like a car that starts fine one day then refuses to do anything the next day. Fixing those kinds of problems can be a real pain until you've done enough of them to see some sort of pattern.

[RoyGBiv]

12. It was the floppy in my instance ...

Not a brand new board, about a year old, an AM2+ socket.

This is also the only machine on which I'm doing this as an upgrade, from XP. The other two were fresh installs, and I thought it was the upgrade process that was the problem. (And it may be at least part of it. Most of the horror stories I've read personally have involved upgrades to existing installations, especially from XP.) In my case the install never even really got started. It just sat there staring at me, taunting me, saying bad things about my grooming habits. I'd given up on it for the time being and was about try to talk the guy into seeing if he could return the upgrade version and fork over the dollars for the full version.

Reading your message actually made me remember I'd had a similar problem before on a different machine with XP, so I took a shot and presto. It worked. I did have a few other issues with that install, but they were minor, and I worked through them. This is actually very similar to a problem I've experienced on some machines with Linux and USB ports. Until those ports are disabled, the install is a no-go, but they work fine afterward. I still don't understand that entirely.

I wonder now if actually having a floppy installed would have made a difference ... ponder, ponder.

In any case, I think there's a larger point to be made here. Not even a company with the resources of Microsoft can possibly test every possible hardware configuration. Problems will arise with any operating system immediately after a release precisely because of this. What works fine on the machines at the lab may not work fine on the machine put together in a person's basement. This is the price of having options. It helps tremendously to have the advice of people out in the real world experiencing these things as opposed to what some marketing director or PR person has to say.