Game Installation.. How long does it take?

[Jarre]

My hardrive crashed on me and is completely *&%$£^!!

so new Hardrive and the laborious task of installing everything.

So i thought why not be usefull and as an experiment time and psot results of who long to isntall from scratch and update.

The aim of this thread is to give new players an idea of how long it will take to fully install thr game.

I started this late last night so will split this into 2 posts.

Some stats first.....

Game run on my PC
My computer:- Athlon 64 3000+ with 1024mb DDR PC3200 ram,
Internet conenction is 2mb ADSL broadband conencted via network card.

Final fantasy Uk version 7 CD pack (includes zilart & promy)+ 1 disk Treasures of Art Urhgan.

Disk installation using my DVD burning drive which reads cd's at 52x speed.

File sizes are taken from running netmeter in the background.

7 disks total time 40 minutes to install disks. (the DVD version of the game will probably be less)

Final fantasy XI files installation with all expansion packs = 40 minutes.

Playonline viewer update.

Checked 1360'ish files when loaded requested download of 139 files to update to latest version. Update took 15 minutes to check files , 10 minutes total download and install, 39mb total download size.

Playonline update = 25 minutes.

Tommorow I will post time and files size for total check files and download of final fantasy xi updates. I started it last night but gave up due to time as was checking over 13000 files!! so will restart it. tomorrow.

[neighbortaru]

neat idea

the playonline update sounds about right. as for the game update, i'm not brave enough to to try that again so I always keep a backup of the whole ffxi folder after every major update. ballpark I'd say the file check/verify on that is about ~1 hour.

[Aeolus]

I just did exactly what Jarre is doing due to my Hard Drive smouldering underneath. Took me same amount of time to update pol even tho Im only on 512k connection. It took 30mins to check all the bloody FFXI files, I had to do this twice as I cant leave pc on over night and tried to do it before bed, didnt work out lol. Took 1hour 30mins to update which I did while at work. Only took 15mins to install everything but that might be because I didnt use my cds, got a vana collection DVD and the Aht Urghan DVD.

[Jarre]

Yes same scenario as last night checked all files, then looked at clock, said 11:30pm looked at clock on downloads, said 2 hours (though it does drop afetr a while but not by alot) so gave up.

I will report how long it took as I said tomorrow morning (or tonight if Its done a while before my beauty sleep ) will be interesting what the total download in mb would be for the 3000 odd files to update FFXI and expansions from their disk versions to current.

[PTT]

I recently installed from scratch on another PC, after my video card shorted out in my old one, due to a wire twist-tie having some exposed metal and falling near the vid-card.

Anyway, I had all the original-release US discs, and here's how it went...

1) Playonline/Tetra master install CD
2) 3 Final Fantasy XI CDs
3) 1 Rise of Zilart CD (Which was labelled as FFXI disc 4 because the US got it 'for free' included)
4) 2 Chains of Promathia CDs
5) 1 Treasures of Aht Urghan DVD

The file install took about an hour I'd say. It might have taken less time if I didn't leave the room while the discs were copying, and if it hadn't thrown up a copying error at me (The disc was smudged, I didn't notice until I came back, wiped it off, everything was okay).

Then I logged on to Playonline, blah blah, activated my account on this computer, proceeded to check files,

On my version, it had to check 14,000+ (About, I'm guesstimating) files, and had to download about 3000+ files if I remember correctly. That took an hour or 2 on a DSL connection (factoring in the slow 'checking files' time).

Your mileage may vary, but that's my experience.

[Jarre]

Ok finally finished.... continued from my above posts...
File checking 14396 files - Time taken = 38 minutes.
The main FFXI download (I did this in 2 parts, 300 files last night before I gave up and the rest today)
Last night 300 files 20 minutes - 26mb
Tonight 2948 files - 1 hour 23 minutes 297mb
Total FFXI download = 323mb - 1 hour 43 minutes.
Install downloaded files 12 minutes
Summary time..... Total time from inserting first disk to everything downloaded and installed = 3 hours 37 minutes.
Total download = 362mb
I enlcose a screen shot close to end of d/l showing netmeter and the update screen. The download speed was very eratic going between 0.5kb/s to 133.5kbs. but general download speed was in the average of 40-60 kb/s. The large close together peaks in the graph show the large files, largest single file was around 6.5mb.

Hope this helps anyone whos having to install froms cratch, this is what to expect.