Win7PRO to Win10PRO Upgrade
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@JaredBusch said:
If you are on fairly new hardware that you expect to last another 2-3 years, then upgrade it all to Windows 10.
^ this x10
We only plan on moving next year as getting new machines with 7 will be hard / impossible.
Likely we will not do a rollout but just gradually go as we replace machines.
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Most of my machines were replaced when XP was retired, so they are fairly new. I expect another 3-5 years out of them.
I will do everything I can to upgrade before the free upgrade offer expires. I fully expect MS to extend the free upgrade offer, BUT I don't want to risk it.
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You will have to manually update each machine on it's own. This is a legal requirement to get the upgrade attached to the machine. After you upgrade, you can roll back to Win7 if you want, you can reinstall Win10 from scratch, deploy a corporate image, whatever you want.
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That is my situation. Almost all of my clients have newer machines that I expect from 2-5 more years out of at a minimum.
Rolling everything to 10 just makes sense.
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@BRRABill said:
@MattSpeller said:
@BRRABill We are just starting to think about it for mid2017 - it'll require a butt load of user training and testing of all our insane number of weird one off apps and junk.
7 is supported until 2020 so there's no rush.
That was kind of my thinking, too. I could be dead by then, and wouldn't have to worry about it.
But after reading the thread yesterday I felt like I was the only ML user who hadn't migrated.
We haven't migrated yet, and we don't even have anything special. We're a MS office / Adobe shop.
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@JaredBusch said:
@MattSpeller said:
@BRRABill EHEhehehehehe
You are most certainly not. I run Win10 at home for my own personal punishment. We trialed win8.1 on some tablet-y things but got terrible feedback on the OS and the hardware.
2020 is a lonnnngggg way away.
And Windows 7 is ancient.
Yes, remember that Windows 7 is seven years old. Seven years, for a computer OS! It's amazing to think that people still consider this a reasonable system to keep running (outside of those special circumstances.) Three major updates with names and one or two without since Win 7 came out. It was a good release, sure, but seven years!?!?
That's nearly a decade. 70% of one, anyway.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
@MattSpeller said:
@BRRABill EHEhehehehehe
You are most certainly not. I run Win10 at home for my own personal punishment. We trialed win8.1 on some tablet-y things but got terrible feedback on the OS and the hardware.
2020 is a lonnnngggg way away.
And Windows 7 is ancient.
Yes, remember that Windows 7 is seven years old. Seven years, for a computer OS! It's amazing to think that people still consider this a reasonable system to keep running (outside of those special circumstances.) Three major updates with names and one or two without since Win 7 came out. It was a good release, sure, but seven years!?!?
That's nearly a decade. 70% of one, anyway.
What makes Windows 10 that much better?
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@BRRABill said:
What makes Windows 10 that much better?
It's 7 years newer, all the security lessons that MS has learn applied. Refinement.
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@BRRABill said:
Another question/thought is that I am going to be upgrading to a 2012 domain shortly. Should I do the Win10 upgrade AFTER that for group policy reasons?
You can update the GP central store. domain level doesn't affect GP.
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I'm in the same situation, 17 Dell Desktops with W7
I upgraded one machine using Windows Update, no error in all the process, looking the license appear as correctly activated.
Now I'm going to create a image to clone the computers, using this tutorial you can activate W10 licence before install it
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
@MattSpeller said:
@BRRABill EHEhehehehehe
You are most certainly not. I run Win10 at home for my own personal punishment. We trialed win8.1 on some tablet-y things but got terrible feedback on the OS and the hardware.
2020 is a lonnnngggg way away.
And Windows 7 is ancient.
Yes, remember that Windows 7 is seven years old. Seven years, for a computer OS! It's amazing to think that people still consider this a reasonable system to keep running (outside of those special circumstances.) Three major updates with names and one or two without since Win 7 came out. It was a good release, sure, but seven years!?!?
That's nearly a decade. 70% of one, anyway.
What makes Windows 10 that much better?
What makes any software better over time? Seven years is huge, especially when you consider this is the core product of the world's largest software company and nothing but refinements and updates to the same version - so no rewrites. That's seven years of a massive team implementing new technology, new techniques - not only to the core codebase but also to the compiler that compiles it. Seven years of new technologies to support such as the latest Skylake CPU features, as an example. Seven years of bug fixes, refactoring, cleaning up, new knowledge applied, new features, new thought processes, etc.
Seven years more mature code base. That's epic. Windows 7 came out in 2009 as the first point release update to Vista. Vista released in 2007. The Vista family has NINE years of maturity into it, but you are giving up seven of those nine years of maturity when you choose Windows 7 giving you only two years of maturity instead of the nine that Windows 10 has. That's nearly all of the time that Windows has been being improved that you just don't have.
And all of that is just about the code. It doesn't take into account things like compatibility, long term support, ease of future migrations, leveraging current value, etc.
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@BRRABill said:
What makes Windows 10 that much better?
The three biggest places where you see seven years of work are security, performance and features.
Windows 10 is faster than 8.1 which was faster than 8 which was faster than 7 (which in turn was faster than Vista.) That's a big deal. Your existing hardware goes farther with 10.
Security is quite big. If you are security conscious at all, using old (read: immature, untested) code bases make no sense. Security requires maturing.
Features. This one is more obvious. For seven years MS has been adding stuff to Windows. Staying on old systems you just give that up.
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I'm still pretty mixed on this.
Fundamentally I know there can be very few reasons to not depend on the chance that the developers are competent and doing right by you over time.
I've also seen where @scottalanmiller describes a totally unstable experience. At the same time I know several other Mangoes haven't had any of the same issues. My own experience is really limited but had a pretty fair amount of glitchy type stuff, empty dialog boxes and empty error messages to work through. 7 years of advances shouldn't mean anything close to having to work back through the basics of an OS or waiting and hoping for those basics to catch back up.
The 7 years old point is accurate for sure and worthwhile in more ways than one, but a little disingenuous in another respect too while 7's still being updated.
Finally I haven't seen a ton of talk here recently about either the question of MS's true regard for user privacy and security over time, or the turn towards explaining even less about what's in each update.
As a sysadmin keeping your users patched and updated is doing your job, following best practices and covering your ass. Maybe I could have been good at being paranoid if the last 15 years hadn't snuck up so fast, but it's way too late for that now too.
I don't want to take this toward a security discussion or try to advocate moving everyone to Mint before 2020 or something.
The standard best practices sysadmin approach just has these couple inconsistencies to me in this case. I know there are a ton of limits to my knowledge that would probably explain some of this.
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@ryanblahnik I'll definitely give you the glitchy stuff is annoying, but more often than not, in my experience (and I'm pretty sure in Scott's too) those problems were primarily limited to users using an upgrade to 10. While it would be great to think that MS has solved their upgrade woes, considering all of the third party software out there, there are just to many unknowns in my opinion to expect that to work well (yet the 100+ million that moved and stayed on Windows 10 initially probably did just that - upgraded and nothing more).
I have found that after doing an upgrade to get your license, doing a complete OS reset (or wipe and reinstall) generally solves any issues at the OS level. Of course this is a huge pain in the ass, you have to backup your data (wait - you didn't do that already before upgrade?), reinstalling your apps (this means in some cases you have to uninstall them correctly to deregister an app so you can reinstall it - most of the time you have no clue which apps require this until you've already been bit by it) etc, etc.
You mentioned privacy. How is MS any different than any of a dozen plus other tech companies doing the exact same thing - I'll tell you how - THEY ARE TELLING YOU THEY ARE DOING IT.
Most if not everyone today is collecting mostly anonymous usage data on their users, I believe, to help them improve their products. MS is just finally joining the bandwagon.
Samnsung TV's now have a built in microphone and is streaming everything it hears off to a third party (yeah, not Samnsung, but to a unknown partner of Samnsung's).
We've had discussions around ML about who do you trust with your data? In general the consensus was that we trusted larger mega companies because they have more to lose if that data gets loose. Unlike the government - they have nothing to lose.
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@iroal said:
I'm in the same situation, 17 Dell Desktops with W7
I upgraded one machine using Windows Update, no error in all the process, looking the license appear as correctly activated.
Now I'm going to create a image to clone the computers, using this tutorial you can activate W10 licence before install it
Interesting. If this works, this will be the first way to use cloning/imaging that appears (without reading the EULA) to be legal to deploy images without using VL media.
I'm wondering, does running gatherosstate.exe do the process that actually registers your machine with MS? Or is that not handled until the associated GenuineTicket.xml file is run under the Windows 10 install?
I have to assume the latter, otherwise why bother doing the latter?
I would be interested to know - if after doing this and verifying that it's activated, if you wipe the machine again, and install Win10 from scratch again, will it auto activate without the need to save this file?
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@ryanblahnik said:
The 7 years old point is accurate for sure and worthwhile in more ways than one, but a little disingenuous in another respect too while 7's still being updated.
Windows 7 still is supported with patches, it is not getting updated. Not the same thing. Only necessary fixes are still applied. The code base continuous to age in general.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ryanblahnik said:
The 7 years old point is accurate for sure and worthwhile in more ways than one, but a little disingenuous in another respect too while 7's still being updated.
Windows 7 still is supported with patches, it is not getting updated. Not the same thing. Only necessary fixes are still applied. The code base continuous to age in general.
it's in extended support now, so sure, but for the first 5 years it was "" more than just updates/patches.
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@ryanblahnik said:
The standard best practices sysadmin approach just has these couple inconsistencies to me in this case. I know there are a ton of limits to my knowledge that would probably explain some of this.
I don't see any inconsistencies. Staying updated is important and a best practice but nothing in a panacea.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@ryanblahnik said:
The 7 years old point is accurate for sure and worthwhile in more ways than one, but a little disingenuous in another respect too while 7's still being updated.
Windows 7 still is supported with patches, it is not getting updated. Not the same thing. Only necessary fixes are still applied. The code base continuous to age in general.
it's in extended support now, so sure, but for the first 5 years it was "" more than just updates/patches.
Not in a general sense. What important updates to security structure, functionality, refactoring, kernel performance, etc. were added?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@ryanblahnik said:
The 7 years old point is accurate for sure and worthwhile in more ways than one, but a little disingenuous in another respect too while 7's still being updated.
Windows 7 still is supported with patches, it is not getting updated. Not the same thing. Only necessary fixes are still applied. The code base continuous to age in general.
it's in extended support now, so sure, but for the first 5 years it was "" more than just updates/patches.
Not in a general sense. What important updates to security structure, functionality, refactoring, kernel performance, etc. were added?
I'm pretty sure there were some changes/updates with SP1, but beyond that, not sure any did really happen... but that is why I said "" to mean that MS claims they can/do release these types of updates, but often doesn't and leaves them for the new versions.
