3%. 5%. 34%! 97%! 97… 98…
In: Technology
Loading bars are entirely a psychological construct. They aren’t tied to anything specific in terms of progress they exist purely to show the user that whatever process it is, be it an install or a patch or whatever, is making progress and isn’t just stalled.
Anyone that’s run complex cmdline commands knows how much of a pain it is to hit Enter and sit there seeing a blinking cursor and just waiting there for the task to finish wondering if the task is frozen or not.
Status Bars and the animated gif of the circle you get on phones during updates is just there to say “I’m working on it, be patient”
The status bar progress has little to do with the actual amount of time needed to do a task.
0-25% might represent finishing copying files that took 5 minutes while 26% to 60% was writing registry keys that took 10 seconds, and 61% to 90% was a checksum and copying a shortcut to the desktop.
It’s all pretty arbitrary, and the speed of the install varies from system to system anyway.
How fast files download and copy is entirely dependent on things like your internet speed, hard drive speed, etc which varies from machine to machine.
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