Time required for a base Windows 7 install

By apexwm, 10 May, 2011 18:24

Yesterday I had the task of installing Windows 7 with SP1 on an HP EliteBook 8460p. This is a new machine, with the Intel i5 processor and 4 GB of RAM. During the process, I began to note the amount of time that was needed to get the laptop up and running. Why not leave the default copy of Windows that came with the machine from HP? Because it came with Windows 7 Professional, and Windows 7 Enterprise was needed to comply with strict EA licensing requirements of Microsoft.

Recently there have been articles relating to the amount of time needed to run updates for Windows 7. But I'm talking about the time needed to install a base Windows 7 installation, and then install all of the drivers to get all of the hardware in the system working.

On the HP 8460p, Windows 7 with SP1 installed in roughly 30 minutes. No problems there and the Windows 7 installer is very easy to follow. Thankfully, it did not try to install Windows updates because Windows could not detect and install any network card drivers. But, unfortunately there were other missing drivers as well. In the end, I ended up having to download 17 separate files from hp.com, install them, and reboot in order to get all of the hardware working correctly. Downloading 17 files and running them sounds easy, but it takes time to read through line by line at the list of drivers for all of the variations of the laptop, and figure out which ones apply to this particular machine. This process took about an hour by the time I got everything downloaded, installed, and rebooted. Then after the final reboot I noticed that there was one "Unknown device" left in the Device Manager. So what is this? I've been through all 17 installers from hp.com, now what? I try to "update driver software" for the device, but Windows just says "Windows could not find driver software for your device. If you know the manufacturer of your device, you can visit its website and check the support section for driver software". Well, let's eat up some more time to comb through the list of drivers on HP's site to make sure I didn't miss one. I eventually put the machine aside as it was starting to eat up too much time, as I had installed about 5 additional installers that I had not done with the first round, as I did not think that the corresponding hardware was in the system (i.e. the modem). I'll eventually get back to it to try and get it wrapped up. An hour and 30 minutes used so far, and it is not ready yet.

I'm not going to wipe the drive just to test this, but based on systems with the same specs, it takes about 40 minutes to install Fedora 14 Linux, and get full hardware support up and running all in one step. With Fedora and most Linux distributions, all of the drivers are included in the kernel and modules are activated automatically, so hardware is actively running the very first time it boots. No running around trying to search and download extra installers. I would estimate it takes roughly half of the time to install a current version of Linux, than an equivalent Windows 7 with SP1.

And the issue with the "unknown device"? The Linux kernel is much better at identifying devices that it knows about. Every kernel event is logged in the file /var/log/messages, so that each device can be seen as it's detected. There are a lot of entries in this file, but the point is that everything is there, provided that there is kernel support for the devices; as far as I know, Windows offers no verbose log of its kernel and what it does as it boots. It does however offer an alternative which is in Device Manager, the Vendor ID and Device ID can be obtained and Googled to help find out what the mystery device is. There are times that an extra package must be installed, mainly due to drivers that are locked into being 100% proprietary. For Fedora, extra packages from RPMFusion will usually take care of the proprietary drivers, if needed. For instance, most newer Broadcom wireless devices need the "broadcom-wl" package installed from RPMFusion. And there are times that hardware is just not supported, which is very rare especially when dealing with main brand machines like Dell, HP, Acer, etc.

Once the laptop is good with Windows, it will be sysprepped and an image will be created for further deployments using Clonezilla.

On later to Windows updates, sigh, which will surely eat up at least another 30+ minutes of waiting and rebooting. I'll try not to think about how easy it is to update Linux with a couple clicks and ONE or even zero reboots needed.