As the adage goes, “All good things must come to and end.” Microsoft has announced that as of July 29, 2016, it will no longer offer the free Windows 10 upgrade to Win7 and 8 users. Now whether this offer qualified as “good” is a matter of debate for some folks, especially the ones that have been nagged to the edge of patience to upgrade, or the ones that finally relented, only to discover that despite Microsoft’s assurances that their computer was readyfor the switch, it was very much not. For those of you still dutifully ignoring Microsoft’s system tray app “Get Windows 10” (aka GWX), your ordeal will be over before the summer is done.
What this means for you:
If you’ve been holding out upgrading, but still plan to take the plunge, you’ll have to make a decision very shortly. Though it’s likely Microsoft will have some sort of upgrade offer to carry on the Windows 10 crusade, it may not be as generous as the one expiring in a few short months. My recommendation hasn’t changed in this regard: your computer needs to be a late model computer (2 years old, max!) with at least 4GB of RAM and at least 500GB of hard drive space, running a 64-bit OS before you should even consider upgrading. On top of this, your OS must be in tip-top shape, meaning no recent malware infections, major software crashes or undiagnosed performance issues – these things will wreck a Windows 10 upgrade without exception. Additionally, you need to make sure any critical software on that computer is Windows 10 compatible and supportable. The latter is key – lots of software will run on Windows 10, but the manufacturer may not provide any support, and even if you have pros like C2 in your corner, there’s only so much we can do without official support. Look before you leap, but start looking now!
It’s getting harder and harder to make excuses for Microsoft when it comes to Windows 10, and they are quickly eroding whatever good will they may have sown with the free upgrades offered last year. If you weren’t already traumatized by an intentional or unintentional “upgrade” to 10, or if you happened to be one of the lucky few to walk the upgrade gauntlet (relatively) unscathed, Microsoft seems determined to make you regret installing its new operating system – let’s call it “death by 1000 annoyances.” The latest insult: many users are reporting a recent update to Windows 10 is resetting the default app assignments on their computers to – you guessed it – Microsoft apps.
Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout Woo?
One of the “features” of Windows 10 is the inexorable, unstoppable OS updates that Microsoft forces upon everyone. There are ways to trick Windows 10 into not downloading updates, and if your computer happens to be a part of a managed domain your administrator may be able to exert some control, but Microsoft has gone on record stating that giving users less control over this aspect is really for everyone’s own good. In the above case, a yet-to-be-identified recently released update from Microsoft is actually resetting choices you’ve made to your own computer to a setting that arguably benefits Microsoft. A good example of this is one that several of my clients have already experienced: instead of using Acrobat to open PDF’s, the OS is being reset to use Microsoft’s new browser, Edge – hardly a comparable substitute, especially for those that paid good money for the full versions of Acrobat. The default PDF app setting is one of possibly hundreds of default settings that Microsoft can “accidentally reset” so the annoyance potential on this “feature” is incredibly high. Fortunately it’s not permanent, and once you figure out what the heck is going on, it’s not hard to reverse. But it’s just another thorn on this once attractive, but increasingly prickly, OS rose.
Most of us have seen the persistent little icon in the system tray, and clicked the many variations of “Not now!” to Microsoft’s constant reminders to upgrade to Windows 10. Some of you even caved in and upgraded your computer to Winodws 10, and an even smaller percentage of you have come out on the other side mostly intact and productive. I still continue to recommend against upgrading existing Windows 7 and 8 computers without considerable caution, planning and the watchful supervision of a trained technology professional. “Cleanly” installed (either on a blank hard drive or from the factory new), Windows 10 is a good operating system that performs well but still has many rough edges, and I have seen way too many upgrade installations go south faster than geese in winter. For reliabililty and performance, Windows 7 is still very hard to beat, and is still considered the standard in enterprise/corporate technology. Despite all of this, Microsoft continues to advance its agenda of “Upgrade all the things”, and has now made the Windows 10 upgrade installer a “recommended update”.
What this means for you:
By default, Windows 7 and 8 are set to automatically check for, download and install critical security updates. There is also another option rug “Recommended updates” which is also checked, and that is where Microsoft gets its virtual hooks into your precious Windows 7 (or 8, I’m not here to judge) operating system and plants the seeds of an upgrade. If your machine is still set to download recommended updates (as it will be if you’ve never changed these settings), you will soon be (if you aren’t already) the proud recipient of a 6GB hidden folder that, if you continue to deny Microsoft the satisfaction of upgrading you to Windows 10, will reside happily on its little 6GB plot of hard drive. Forever. Removing it doesn’t help – Windows Update will cheerfully re-download it for you, to make sure your Windows 10 upgrade experience isn’t slowed down by having to download it when you finally give in to their relentless nagging.
If you have a large hard drive and “all-you-can-eat” internet bandwidth, this isn’t a problem, but for those of you with smaller hard drives (like earlier model laptops with SSD drives) or metered bandwidth, 6GB is a lot of space AND bandwidth. There are ways to combat Microsoft’s insidious peer pressure, but to truly banish the upgrade nagging, you’ll need to fiddle with registry settings or install a third-party utility. If neither sounds like an activity for which you are qualified (either in patience or technical proficiency), why not have a friendly chat with your local tech professional to discuss a more moderate, considered approach to upgrading to Windows 10? If you are a business professional that uses Windows-based computers, its a bridge you will have to cross at some point, but you should do it on your own schedule and on your own terms.
Microsoft made a major splash a few years back when they announced that the NFL would be using the Surface tablets on the field and in the locker room for various aspects of team management. Up until now it really only caught the media’s eye briefly when commentators mistakenly identified the Microsoft tablets as Apple iPads, a stinging verdict on the strength of both Microsoft and Apple’s branding. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the Surface tablets were correctly identified this time at the recent AFC Championship game between the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos. Unfortunate because the Patriots were experiencing technical difficulties with the devices at a crucial moment in the most important game of the season. As you’d expect, the internet had a field day with this, even though the the technical difficulties were quickly overcome, and the Patriots carried on.
What this means for you:
Rather than taking an easy opportunity to poke fun at Microsoft as you might expect, I’m more interested in making sure everyone grasps the more important lesson here. Even though the Surfaces had become an important part of sideline operations during a game, the Patriots were able to keep moving forward with their critical processes because the Surface tablets weren’t a single point of failure in the complex workflow of team and game management. Are there parts of your business or organization that depend on a single point of technology that, if it failed, would prevent you from executing on critical processes or tasks? Always have a back up plan, both in the literal sense (as in: Back up that data!) as well as the figurative. Important presentation tomorrow that you’ve only stored on a single thumb drive and nowhere else? What would happen if that little thumb drive accidentally fell out of your pocket while you were on the way to the big meeting? When it’s game day, make sure you have more than one way to get the ball into the end zone!
Back in 2014 Microsoft announced that in 18 months it would cease to support older versions of Internet Explorer on currently supported operating system platforms. As of January 12th, Microsoft is making good on that promise and will only support the latest version of its web browser on supported OS’es. You might think that this will mean less zero-day exploits of older versions of IE (one of the biggest security risks to date) because people will be forced to abandon the older browsers, but not so fast! Microsoft is trapped within their own doublespeak, and the catch is “lastest version of IE released on a particular supported platform”.
What on earth does that mean?
If you happened to only skim (instead of read) their 2014 announcement or the news stories released this week about this new policy, you might have come away with the impression that Microsoft was finally dropping support for older versions of IE, namely 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Depending on your business need, this may have been cause for celebration or hair pulling, but a slightly deeper dive on this tells a less draconian tale. In a nutshell, depending on the operating system, some older versions will still be getting patched and updated, but only because the newer versions of IE were never officially released on a particular OS. Still confused? That’s OK, it’s Microsoft, so just shrug and take away the following:
- Microsoft will still be patching older versions of Internet Explorer as far back as version 7, but…
- Patches for versions 7-9 are likely to be hard to get, if not near impossible for normal consumers.
- Don’t use older versions of IE unless you have a compelling business restriction that prevents the use of IE 11.
- Businesses relying on websites that require the use of older versions of IE should be upgraded ASAP. You are putting your employees/clients/customers in danger.
- Remember #3? If you have to use Internet Explorer, you should be using version 11. It has competent backwards-compatibility capabilities that should work with websites that require older versions of IE to function.
The launch of Windows 10 saw a marked increase in the amount of data the OS collected and sent back to the Microsoft mothership. Despite the general hue and outcry from privacy watchdogs, Microsoft actually doubled-down on this practice shortly after the Windows 10 release and extended this “feature” to Windows 7 and 8 as well. Given that Windows 10 hit 100 million installs in record time, and with a worldwide goal of 1 billion installs in 3 years, Microsoft seems to have decided to break their stony silence on the growing privacy concerns before they hit critical mass. Vice President Terry Myerson confirmed via the Windows Blog that Microsoft is collecting two types of data, and then goes on to mention a set of data they specifically don’t collect, but other platforms (ie: the competition) do.
What this means for you:
The data Microsoft collects from every Windows 7, 8 and 10 computer falls into two buckets they name as “Reliability & Performance” and “Personalization”. The first type of data has actually been collected for years: remember those blue screens of death that plagued our Windows existence? Depending on how your computer was configured, whenever that garish specter showed its ugly face, your computer was compiling an error report that could be sent to Microsoft, ostensibly to catalog and analyze your crash. Assuming enough of those reports came in on the same bug, they would construct a patch that would be rolled into one of the many OS updates applied over the years. Where in previous OS versions this data seemed to be largely compiled and ignored, Microsoft has taken a much more aggressive and proactive approach with the Windows 10 data being collected, and using it to quickly fix issues, improve performance and to add features that users are missing. The important difference now versus years previous was whether or not you had a choice in letting Microsoft see this type of data collected from your computer. From this point forward, you can only adjust the detail of data submitted, but cannot opt out (except by completely disconnecting from the internet forever). According to Microsoft, the data is anonymized, transmitted securely and can never be tracked back to a specific person or machine.
The second set of data (from which you can opt out) is used to feed Microsoft’s digital assistant Cortana (named after a videogame character from the Halo franchise). Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now services is still very new and untested, but shows similar promise in helping Windows 10 users get more from the new OS if they like that sort of thing. The key to these types of services is their ability to build a personal knowledge graph of the user which can be based upon just about every aspect for which a computer or mobile device is used, including location, age, gender, contact lists, favorites, browser & shopping history and so on.
Don’t want Cortana (Microsoft) creating a profile on you? Head to the Windows menu (the one they brought back in 10, remember?), click “Settings” and then “Privacy”. Get settled in to review every entry and adjust to your sense of privacy is somewhat restored, at least as far as Windows 10 is concerned.
By all accounts, the launch of Windows 10 is probably Microsoft’s most successful release since Windows 95. From an IT professional’s perspective and given Microsoft’s history with OS launches, this is definitely the least troubled release since Windows 7 (2009). Despite this, I have gathered enough feedback on the upgrade process, both through my own and client experiences as well as reports from around the web, to not recommend it YET for my clients’ business machines, especially if they are operation-critical devices. While the upgrade process seems to go relatively smoothly and painlessly, the actual problems start to crop up after the process finishes and you attempt to get back to work. Historically, operating systems have never worked well on Windows machines, and while 10’s experience seems to improve on Microsoft’s track record in this area, it’s still a risky path at the moment. Unfortunately, despite my recommendation (one shared by many other pros in the business as well) to avoid upgrading your Windows 7 or 8 machine, Microsoft is essentially forcing you to download a copy anyways, whether you plan to upgrade or not.
What this means for you:
Depending on the amount of free space on your hard drive and bandwidth usage cap of your internet connection, this may be no big deal, especially if you do intend to upgrade to Windows 10 at some point. Microsoft sneaks the package onto your machine via Automatic Updates and stores the 3-6GB download in a hidden folder called “$windows.~BT” (the $ hides directories in Windows and is not a wry, insiders joke made by greedy MS programmers). It will do this even if you have been studiously ignoring the pesky system tray app that constantly reminds you that your free Windows 10 upgrade is just waiting to be installed. According to Microsoft, this is by design and ostensibly done to make the process quick and easy:
For individuals who have chosen to receive automatic updates through Windows Update, we help upgradable devices get ready for Windows 10 by downloading the files they’ll need if they decide to upgrade.
To be fair, some folks (rather impulsively in my opinion) seem to make the decision to upgrade to Windows 10 on the fly, possibly because of the way Microsoft has relentlessly pushed the new OS.
Unfortunately, if you choose to use Automatic Updates (and you should unless your technology is managed by an in-house IT department, at which point they will make that call depending on organizational policy), then you can’t avoid this download without some messy registry hacking and fussing with your computer. I can hear some of you scoffing, “6GB? Who doesn’t have room for 6GB?!” Well, 128GB SSD laptop users for one, and I know many, many folks running older computers with smaller 250GB hard drives that are on the edge of being completely full. On top of this, many folks use cellular broadband on their laptops, and this sizeable “update” could easily push their bandwidth allotment over the edge. While I applaud Microsoft’s forced march towards a modern operating system on all Windows machines (see “The World Still Clings to Windows XP”), this heavy-handedness on top of the privacy concerns has me revising my ranking of this release lower and lower.
Of all the operating system releases in their long and storied history, Microsoft seems at last to be launching an OS that is at once very competent and highly anticipated. In case you didn’t know what today was, Microsoft is launching Windows 10 to the world, and it’s a sure bet that thousands (if not millions) of people are attempting to upgrade right now. As technology evangelist, I applaud their enthusiasm, but as your technology consultant I strongly advise against taking the plunge on opening day.
Here five reasons why:
- Even though Windows 10 has been large-scale testing and beta for months, there will likely be plenty of as-of-yet undiscovered bugs and problems. This has been the case with every operating system ever released in the history of computing. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say there will be bugs, and it will take time to sort them out. Day one upgrades rarely go well for the average computer user.
- Though supposedly the upgrade process is the easiest it’s ever been, I’ve already seen problems with user-initiated upgrades. If you are not careful, you could lose access to business-critical apps, or even your data. Make sure you back up before you upgrade!
- Unless you’ve already tested them, make sure your business critical apps will run on Windows 10 before upgrading your work computers. Even if they do, make sure the software developer has officially given the “thumbs up” – many are not supporting Windows 10 yet, and it may be many months before they are ready to do so.
- Microsoft’s new terms of use have taken a much more invasive stance with regards to your personal privacy. This article summarizes them neatly, but in a nutshell, Windows 10 will be sharing a lot about you, your data and browsing habits unless you disable these “features”. It’s a safe bet that in the first heady days on our whirlwind romance with the new OS, many of us will ignore or forget about this.
- As most will get their free copy of Windows 10 as an upgrade to an existing install of Windows 7 or 8, you need to make sure your current OS is in perfect health. Upgrading a damaged or compromised OS will only lead to heartache and headache, so make sure you get a clean bill of health before upgrading to 10.
If you’d like to read more about Windows 10, I recommend Microsoft’s FAQ. At the very minimum, check with your nearest IT professional about upgrading before you take the plunge, and make sure you have a contigency in place, because, despite our industry’s efforts, Murphy’s Law remains incontrovertible.
Despite the imminent arrival of Windows 10, thousands of businesses and organizations around the world continue to cling to Windows XP. In the business world, this position is increasingly dangerous to a company’s bottom line for a variety of reasons, but for the world’s most (arguably) powerful navy, it could be downright dangerous. The US Navy is actually paying Microsoft nearly $10M to continue to support and patch the expired OS, which was officially “put out to pasture” over a year ago. With over 100K Windows XP computers powering critical systems, the Navy still has a tremendous undertaking to phase the (un)dead OS out of daily operations.
What this means for you:
In a broader sense, it’s disheartening (and a little frightening) to think that our shores are being defended by warships powered by a 14-year old operating system, but the government, like our aircraft carriers, have never been capable of quick maneuvering, so this should come as little surprise to anyone. The fact that many businesses still heavily rely on XP despite repeated warnings from just about everyone in the industry is indicative of a larger problem, which is partly the industry’s fault, as well as a certain willful blindness we all share.
From an IT perspective, we’ve historically done a poor job preparing everyone for the security issues we now face, perhaps relying too heavily on tools and fixes, instead of emphasizing education and reforming business thinking. From an individual (and probably first-world) perspective, we’ve allowed ourselves to become increasingly reliant on technology to accomplish even the most basic tasks, and have built complex technological systems that support our daily lives that most of us can barely comprehend, let alone troubleshoot. A simple password hack can turn into a life-altering identity theft only because most of us fail to truly understand how everything is intertwined, and our personal veils of security are only as strong as the weakest password in your entire collection. The same can be said of your technology infrastructure: you are only as strong as the lowliest of forgotten XP machines on your network, and that isn’t very strong at all, regardless of how much you pay Microsoft.
Microsoft has announced that Windows 10 will be free for users upgrading from Windows 7 and 8. There is an asterisk behind that statement however, and depending on your world-view, it’s a big one. First off, it won’t be free forever – only for a year after its release. It’s not clear what that means if, for example, after upgrading your Windows 7 machine to 10, you need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall. Do you have to reinstall 7 first and then upgrade to 10? Is there a cost if that happens after that initial year has lapsed? Microsoft has also been deliberately vague on what this means for enterprises and organizations with large installations of 7 or 8. Do they get it for free?
What this means for you:
Some experienced industry analysts predict that there will probably be a different “flavor” for the corporate world, especially as Windows 10 will come hard-coded with Microsoft’s new update/upgrade “Windows as a Service” model where improvements and fixes will come at a more rapid pace than most IT organizations have traditionally been willing to follow, and that “versions will no longer matter.” While this might sound like music to the average consumer’s ears, trends like this are rarely viewed favorably in tightly controlled IT environments, especially when it means maintaining compatibility with legacy apps and systems. Microsoft is still fuzzy on when Windows 10 will arrive – “later this year” is the current expectation, but you can bet that most large enterprises and organizations will probably forgo an immediate upgrade, as they have traditionally done for previous iterations of Windows. If you want to see Windows 10 right away there is a preview build which is still in very early development, but unless you are a stalwart early adopter and understand the pitfalls that lie ahead, I’d recommend waiting until it’s officially released. You can also watch Microsoft’s 2+ hour long presentation on the latest build of Windows 10 online.