So, last night I used the "Windows Anytime" gizmo in the control panel and upgraded to Win 7 Pro.

It was painful, even though it didn't really have to download all that much. But it did have to download, and later I found out why. Microsoft just release Win 7 SP1, and the update server is getting hammered. I installed it last night and this morning.

It was taking forever, last night, and I got to the point where I couldn't keep my eyes open. So I went to bed, and this morning I pressed the "restart now" button so the installation could finish.

Saten is downloading it now. It ran blitz-quick until it got to 31% downloaded, and then stalled. Ten minutes later it's up to 33%. It's 9:00 now and I figure it'll finish about noon at the rate it's going.

Probably worth getting, y'all, but definitely worth waiting a bit longer.

UPDATE: 9:30, and 96% downloaded! Ahead of schedule!

UPDATE: 10:00 and all's well! After an hour of downloading and 20 minutes of installation. Whew!

UPDATE: I spoke too soon. It took 15 minutes for the restart.

UPDATE: By the way, SP1 installs .NET, and a program called "mscorsvw.exe" runs fully CPU bound in the background. To make it stop, you have to do this afterwards.

Open a command prompt with administrator privilege.

cd C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727

ngen.exe executequeueditems

(Entering that command on the Slate seemed daunting, so I created a .bat file and ran that.)

UPDATE: I should mention that the ngen takes a long time, especially if you only have a single CPU, because while it's running, mscorsvw continues to run in the background trying to suck CPU cycles. The Slate has a single CPU but it's hyperthreaded, so ngen got one thread and mscorsvw got the other. Even so, it took something like 20 minutes to finish.

Alcyone is a quad-core system, and its CPUs are a lot faster, so it only took about five minutes.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 07:56 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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