migrtion

Windows 7 End of Life January 14, 2020 - Migration Plans

On January 14, 2020 Microsoft support for its Windows 7 Operating system will end.

 

Large organizations such as governments have looked previously to secure ongoing support packages direct with Microsoft for many millions of dollars, here's a way your organization can migrate before

Hardware refresh

If you your computers had Windows 7 preinstalled when you purchased then the hardware is around 5 years old which is over the recommended 3 years hardware refresh period. Not only will your machines be out of hardware warranty, but they will probably still used hard disks instead of solid state harddrives.

This might be the ideal time to purchase new machines which come with Windows 10 preinstalled to save on the license purchase.( currently 220 GBP for a retail copy ). For large refreshes you can use the Microsoft Deployment Technologies with their User State Migration Tool (USMT) for Seamless migrations

 

If your machines came with Windows 10 Licenses on them , then you can use one of the following migration routes to upgrade, if not then you can purchase Windows 10 licenses from your Microsoft Partner

 

Manual Inplace Upgrade

This is advisable for 50 or fewer computers where you have enough time to run this manually, takes around 3 hours.

To get started, go to the Download Windows 10 webpage and click the Download tool now button. After the download completes, run the Media Creation Tool.

 

MDT Windows 10 Upgrade

You can set up Microsoft Deployment Technologies Server and using this workflow , this will enable you to deploy the installation media for the Windows 10 Upgrade across multiple offices

You can script the upgrade to take place automatically without user intervention