Windows 7 End of Life: Many Businesses Still Haven’t Finished Move to Windows 10; Zombie Systems Flourish
January 15th, 2020I run IT for a small business here in NZ and I only had three Windows 7 systems to upgrade to Windows 10 before the deadline. Everything else was already on Windows 10 or macOS.
Out of those three Win 7 to Win 10 upgrades that I had to do, zero out of three were successful, meaning they upgraded AND users were able to continue using the systems without intervention from a technician (me). Those interventions ranged from me having to reset one user’s password, which somehow got nuked during the upgrade, to having to do clean OS and app installs and then manually moving over the user’s data from backup.
So, if you’re reading the piece below and wondering, why haven’t these companies upgraded yet??? Instead of having to do three systems, imagine having to do 300 or 3,000 or 30,000, etc. They have probably tested it and already know the upgrade itself will fail and/or their cludged together custom apps, written in Visual Basic in the 1990s, etc. won’t work anymore, even in compatibility mode.
One user asked me, “What will people do when they try to upgrade and it winds up failing like this?”
“Well, Microsoft’s advice (no joke) is to buy a new computer with Windows 10 already on it. Maybe that’s what they’ll do. Others might give up and try to use their phones or tablets. Maybe some will buy Macs or even switch to Linux.”
Via: Ars Technica:
Today is the day that Microsoft’s extended support for the Windows 7 operating system ends. Microsoft stopped selling Windows 7, which was first released in 2009, on October 13, 2013. Sales of systems with Windows 7 pre-installed ended three years to the day later in 2016. It lived a long life and is survived by Windows 10 and maybe a few remaining instances of Windows 8.
But it seems most organizations are in no hurry to cast off the now-unsupported Microsoft operating system, based on a survey from the enterprise content delivery company Kollective. A survey of 100 US- and UK-based companies found that overall, 53 percent of companies had not completed or had not started migration off of Windows 7 to Windows 10.
The company where I work is still using Win7 on every computer in the company. The IT “Manager” is too lazy and despises his job too much to be bothered with upgrading them (and the co. is so cheap, they probably wouldn’t budget the $$$ for him to do it anyway). But, our network uses a good Avast antivirus program…hopefully that will be adequate.