Tom Austin

In a previous post, I wrote about how surprisingly impressed I was with the upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 on my personal tablet, a Lenovo X61. All in all, a remarkable experience. That machine is now far more stable and far more enjoyable to use. Great job, Microsoft!

I can’t say that experience is universal.

Emboldened by my X61 upgrade (a 32 bit Vista system), I turned to my 18 month old HP mini-tower (an Intel Core 2 Quad-core 2.4 ghz 4GB 64 bit machine I use for personal photo editing and other non-work tasks) and ran the Microsoft Windows 7 upgrade advisor. I removed the three applications it complained about (two that were provided by Canon with their MP 830 multi-function printer; the other was iTunes) and ran the advisor again. Clean bill of health.

I asked Windows 7 (64 bit) to handle the upgrade — and it failed gracefully. After 20 hours of non-progress, I rebooted and the installer rolled the system back to Windows Vista. That everything was restored to pre-upgrade state was a great relief.

But what went wrong? No indication of what the problem was and the upgrade advisor provided another clean bill of health. So I repeated the process, and, after another 24+ hours of non-progress, same result. So — Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade won’t work on this machine. No explanation. But at least no catastrophe. (That is a tremendous improvement on some earlier experiences. For years, I avoided Windows upgrades because of the pain.)

Not a lot of personal time lost but it begs for some analysis. There must be something fundamentally wrong with the architecture of Windows if Windows can’t upgrade itself and can’t even figure out why. The original design of NT V3 provided for separation of externally provided code and data from Microsoft provided code and data, a model that was "violated" in subsequent releases for the sake of performance. Maybe those changes aren’t the cause of these problems but there has got to be some really deep architectural issues that make all of this just too darned hard to manage.

(That’s a personal note, not an official Gartner position, and it’s speculative; I have not examined the structure and implementation of Windows. It’s an experienced hunch based on watching, and sometimes being involved in, major software engineering projects and how compromises come back to bite the compromisers.)

My hat’s off to Microsoft. The Windows 7 upgrade experience is the best Windows upgrade experience I have ever witnessed. Far better than earlier versions. More robust, requiring less labor and failing gracefully. Great job.

So will Microsoft re-architect Windows so upgrades to the OS and related applications can be done reliably, 100 percent of the time?

Should they bother?

What would it do for the overall reliability (and performance) of the product?

1 Comment »

Category: Uncategorized     Tags:

Share