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Rob_Merritt
10-26-2009, 06:03 AM
I've decided to actively tackle my backlog of doom. At the very least I’m installing some of them. Since I’ve been buying almost all my pc games via online download stores I hadn’t noticed that installs have been getting really long. I installed 3 games from Ubisoft over the weekend (Prince of Persia, Shaun White, and H.A.W.X.) and each took over an hour. That was from the time I first put in the disk until I was playing. Exactly when did that become acceptable?
Cubit
10-26-2009, 06:05 AM
I don't know what to tell you. I've installed HAWX and PoP, and neither of those took an hour for me. It might be your computer.
copet
10-26-2009, 06:09 AM
The only long install is one that makes you switch CDs/DVDs. DAMN YOU NEVERWINTER NIGHTS!
Grifman
10-26-2009, 06:09 AM
I've decided to actively tackle my backlog of doom. At the very least I’m installing some of them. Since I’ve been buying almost all my pc games via online download stores I hadn’t noticed that installs have been getting really long. I installed 3 games from Ubisoft over the weekend (Prince of Persia, Shaun White, and H.A.W.X.) and each took over an hour. That was from the time I first put in the disk until I was playing. Exactly when did that become acceptable?

When having a crappy PC got acceptable maybe? :)

Seriously, I'v never had a game take that long but games do take up more space now so I wouldn't be surprised if they take longer, just not an hour though.
Rob_Merritt
10-26-2009, 06:13 AM
Ok, well then maybe the issue is on my end. My computer is fairly high end and benchmark results are in an acceptable range. I have noticed booting takes a lot longer these days.
z22
10-26-2009, 06:31 AM
I wonder if this is related to my recent problems. Late last week I install Java JDK (jdk-6u16-windows-i586.exe) on both my work and home PC. It took 2 minutes on my work PC and over 15 minutes on my home PC. My home PC is as least 3x as fast and powerful as my work PC. Work PC has XP, home is Vista. I also installed the latest AVG (v9) and that also took forever, but maybe it was doing a full scan of my PC?

Don't know what to make of it.
Bahimiron
10-26-2009, 06:58 AM
Ok, well then maybe the issue is on my end. My computer is fairly high end and benchmark results are in an acceptable range. I have noticed booting takes a lot longer these days.

You probably need another 16 gigs of ram. The sweet spot is really at around 32 these days.
unbongwah
10-26-2009, 07:12 AM
The only games I've had take anywhere near that long to install are the ones which had to download massive patches (e.g., Company of Heroes, MMORPGs). But I presume you're only talking about disc-to-HDD installs. Definitely when I installed PoP it didn't take more than 5-10 minutes. I'd say there's something funky with your PC.
Paul_cze
10-26-2009, 08:51 AM
Yeah, 10 minutes on average.Game that installed the longest so far was GRID, somewhere around 20 minutes.
jellyfish
10-26-2009, 09:12 AM
OMG Minesweeper took me over three months to install!
wisefool
10-26-2009, 09:16 AM
Dude, you should be able to DOWNLOAD and install a game within an hour. Maybe you got an AV issue. Do you have two antivirus engines on?

Sequential writes -

Modern hard drives should copy 30-45 MB/sec
With an antivirus on it'll drop to 10 MB/sec or so (paging Wumpus).
Mike O'Malley
10-26-2009, 09:17 AM
You kids these days don't understand what a long install means! Back in my day, when you hand-entered octets copied line by line from the pages of Byte magazine into your 22-row CRT, feeling your eyes screaming for mercy as you failed a checksum for the third time...

That, sir, was a long install.
Case
10-26-2009, 09:17 AM
Defrag your disk, maybe? Is it more than 50% full?
Tim James
10-26-2009, 09:41 AM
I was kind of wondering if developers were using lengthy file compression to try to fit onto a single DVD.
Fugitive
10-26-2009, 09:49 AM
I was kind of wondering if developers were using lengthy file compression to try to fit onto a single DVD.
They do, but decompression is usually pretty fast nowadays.

I'd check the Event Viewer for any suspicious messages from drivers. Maybe the IDE controller is wigging out and resets/timeouts/retries are slowing down disk operations a lot.
Imryll
10-26-2009, 09:54 AM
I've decided to actively tackle my backlog of doom. At the very least I’m installing some of them. Since I’ve been buying almost all my pc games via online download stores I hadn’t noticed that installs have been getting really long. I installed 3 games from Ubisoft over the weekend (Prince of Persia, Shaun White, and H.A.W.X.) and each took over an hour. That was from the time I first put in the disk until I was playing. Exactly when did that become acceptable?

Hah! I raise you modded Morrowind and Oblivion installs. For some reason a clean install of Windows 7 seemed a good idea ...
Dan_Theman
10-26-2009, 10:05 AM
I agree with your assessment that the issue is likely on your end, and with some of the above posters that the defrag/disable AV route is probably a good (and free!) first try.
Murbella
10-26-2009, 10:30 AM
Are you sure your hard drive isn't dying/dead?

I can find my bg1/2/expansions cds, download the major mod for each, install them all and configure bg1 to work through the bg2 engine in less than an hour most likely.
WarrenM
10-26-2009, 10:35 AM
You kids these days don't understand what a long install means! Back in my day, when you hand-entered octets copied line by line from the pages of Byte magazine into your 22-row CRT, feeling your eyes screaming for mercy as you failed a checksum for the third time...

That, sir, was a long install.
Only to find out, 3 days later, that the game sucks pretty bad but you keep playing because dammit you invested some serious time into this!
rei
10-26-2009, 10:43 AM
Man, I'm not that old but I remember (not) fondly entering BASIC code from 3-2-1 Contact magazine.
Blackadar
10-26-2009, 10:54 AM
No, I think the OP has a valid point. I think sometimes you just run into something behind the scenes that takes forever to get around. On my old system, any EA game (like the Sims) would take forever to install. On my current system, Empire:TW took almost an hour and a half to load. World of Warcraft patches take forever unless I boot in safe mode before running them, yet WAR patches just fine. And the EA stuff that used to take forever installs and loads very quickly.

Some of it you can chalk up to DRM - though the Prince of Persia he loaded has no DRM. I wonder if there's something with the install package on Ubisoft games that had some sort of conflict with his machine.
Rob_Merritt
10-26-2009, 11:19 AM
Only to find out, 3 days later, that the game sucks pretty bad but you keep playing because dammit you invested some serious time into this!

Ah, but if the game sucked you had the power to change it. That was the best part. tinkering with the code afterwards.
AlanT
10-26-2009, 12:07 PM
Basic was easy to enter. You see, the thing is, Mike O'Malley is not actually exaggerating. I really did use to sometimes type in a couple of Kb's worth of hex back in the ZX81 days. The slightly amazing thing is that I got the damn things to run.

Things were much easier on platforms with DATA statements. I was so envious of my Vic-owning friends.

And when I actually got a c64 and assembler (I think it was the MIKRO one), well, that was just making things too easy.
Miramon
10-26-2009, 12:10 PM
You kids these days don't understand what a long install means! Back in my day, when you hand-entered octets copied line by line from the pages of Byte magazine into your 22-row CRT, feeling your eyes screaming for mercy as you failed a checksum for the third time...

That, sir, was a long install.

Yeah, or when you couldn't even afford a copy of Creative Computing, you had to recode Hunt the Wumpus from scratch based on a vague memory of how it worked from skimming the source listing at the store.
Pogo
10-26-2009, 12:18 PM
Defragment your hard drive.
Rob_Merritt
10-26-2009, 12:32 PM
Defragment your hard drive.

Is there a decent tool to do that? I tried the one built into Vista. It just says defragging with no other detail status updates. I let it run for over 48 hours and it was still going. FYI the drive is a 750 gig sata drive.
Coca Cola Zero
10-26-2009, 12:33 PM
Are you running a sane OS or are you one of those crazy XP holdouts? I remember XP had a longstanding bug where sometimes the harddisks would drop out of DMA mode for no reason and everything would get real slow until you went into the device manager and checked the checkbox to reenable it.
Cal
10-26-2009, 12:34 PM
Is there a decent tool to do that? I tried the one built into Vista. It just says defragging with no other detail status updates. I let it run for over 48 hours and it was still going. FYI the drive is a 750 gig sata drive.

I'd Swear by Perfectdisk or O+O defrag. I have some of the games you mentioned and an average system and they took 5-10mins each. I have 3 x 500GB drives and they take maybe 30mins each once a month to defrag.
Munky
10-26-2009, 04:13 PM
I seem to recall World of Warcraft at release took an obscenely long time to install. At least an hour.
LMN8R
10-26-2009, 04:18 PM
Most games still install quickly for me, but I might not be the best to ask since I get most games through Steam/Impulse now...automatic installation after download, so I don't notice it.

The only relatively recent games I remember are Gears of War and Prince of Persia.
cliffski
10-27-2009, 02:15 AM
Is there a decent tool to do that? I tried the one built into Vista. It just says defragging with no other detail status updates. I let it run for over 48 hours and it was still going. FYI the drive is a 750 gig sata drive.

I use this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contig_(defragmentation_utility)

More status data than any sane person could want :D
It still takes ages, but it lets you defrag just one folder, which is sometimes worth doing (like game data files)
Rob_Merritt
10-27-2009, 04:37 AM
I grabbed the Perfect Disk trial. It said my drive was only .2% fragmented. I forced it, it took 10 hours and ended up at .1% fragmented. Since that was way greater than ~30 minutes I guess I still have an issue.

So I'm taking this to hardware:
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=55611
z22
10-28-2009, 08:13 AM
I use this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contig_(defragmentation_utility)

More status data than any sane person could want :D
It still takes ages, but it lets you defrag just one folder, which is sometimes worth doing (like game data files)

Is this what you're referring to?
Contig v1.55 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897428.aspx)
TheJare
10-28-2009, 08:32 AM
I seem to recall World of Warcraft at release took an obscenely long time to install.
It just felt that way because you knew some of your friends were already leveling up.