Windows 7 or Windows 10 for the domain PCs

[genesis]

Hi

We are running Windows 7 professional on the PCs on our Domain for admin staff, teaching staff and students. Please let me know if it is the right time to migrate to Windows 10.Please let me know if you all have moved to Windows 10 on your network and your users experience using Windows 10.

Please suggest and your suggestions would be great. Thanks in advance.

[Fazza]

The longer you leave it, the harder the transition will be for your staff. We have a mixture of OS's on our admin staffs PCs and what I've noticed is that those we managed to get on to 8.x have gotten on with Windows 10 with fewer questions than those we have upgraded from 7 as there have been quite a few change since that was released!

 

You'll also find that a fair few will have Windows 10 on their devices at home so may already be used to it!

[jthompson]

With only a couple of years left of security support for Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 (up until the end of 2019), you'll want to have completed the transition and be shot of it before then. New Intel systems have also ditching support for Win 7, so new machines from now on (pretty much) are going to need Win 10 anyway.

I'm going to start work on Win10 over the summer, with a view to having it deployed on all the clients by the end of the next academic year.

[Fazza]

I'm going to start work on Win10 over the summer, with a view to having it deployed on all the clients by the end of the next academic year.

 

We've been putting it on Staff Laptops as and when they come in for a service/repair etc. etc. and I'm currently creating a Windows 10 Golden Image for the Student Computers that can handle it ready to deploy over the Summer Holidays like yourself. We wanted to go to Windows 10 for the Students sooner but the British Computer Society (BCS) didnt support Windows 10 and Office 2016 for their ECDL course until recently so have had to stick with the outdated old software called Windows 8.x and Office 2013. It's ironic that the BCS now support W10 etc. just as we've dropped ECDL from our Academy!

[3s-gtech]

Windows 10 is far from a perfect OS, but 7 is getting very old now. It's certainly worth working towards implementing it - this isn't just a case of saying 'right, let's use Windows 10 instead' though - as an example, I have spent the last two years getting our domain, GPs, hardware and images ready for rolling 10 out this Summer. I had begun working on this in 2015 with a view to doing it last Summer but I felt the OS wasn't ready so delayed the rollout by twelve months.

[thimon]

The sooner you can get on Windows 10 the better. It will take you time to get Group Policy how you want it, you can't just use the same policies for Windows 10. We're now 100% Windows 10 however it's taken about a year to get here, I'm finally happy with Group Policies applied, login times, software used by staff being compatible, etc. Users have had no issues with the change over from 7 to 10, most prefer Windows 10 due to its cleaner interface compared to 7. A lot of hardware we're buying now doesn't support Windows 7. My recommendation is to do it now before it becomes a rushed job.