Windows 10 – Should your business upgrade?

The Windows 10 free upgrade offer will be ending soon. Up until now, most of our clients have been running Windows 7 Pro because it is a good operating system and there was no compelling reason to switch to Windows 8. Most people did not want to learn the completely different interface that Windows 8 came with. However, users of Windows 7 will find that Windows 10 is a much more familiar interface, and there may be reasons to look at switching.

Performance

With Windows 10, the operating system has been optimized to boot more quickly and run most applications a little faster. Some of these performance improvements were included with Windows 8 and now it's even better in Windows 10.

Longevity

Microsoft has stated that they will stop supporting Windows 7 in 2020. At that point it will no longer be safe to run Windows 7 in a business environment. This is similar to how Windows XP is no longer supported. In contrast, Microsoft has stated that Windows 10 will be their last Windows operating system. The plan is that they will continue to update Windows 10 for the foreseeable future. If that is the case, then at some point we will all move from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10.

In addition to the performance increases and longer lifespan, Windows 10 also includes many security improvements and administrative features which make these systems easier to manage in a business environment.

At this point, any Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer is eligible to receive a free upgrade to Windows 10. This offer is available until July 29, 2016. After that date, it will cost about $250 per computer for the upgrade license.

We are recommending the following plan for businesses upgrading to Windows 10:

1) Identify about 10% of your computers to install the Windows 10 update on. This will be a trial to ensure Windows 10 works well in your environment and that your programs work as expected. If there are any issues, your IT support team should work with your software vendors to ensure things are working properly.

2) After 2-4 weeks of testing, install Windows 10 on the remainder of the computers.