Are my school PC's good enough to upgrade to Windows 10?

[steves22]

We have a mixture of dual core PC's , mostly 2 GB RAM but some 4 GB. Processors are around 2 to 3 Ghz. Mostly Viglen genie ultra small PC's. Usual school software - office, sophos, impero, some photoshop (on 4GB machines). Microsoft site say our spec is OK but suppliers say only i3 or higher processors would give acceptable performance. Machines are about 8 years old and budget is very limited. So grateful for any comments to upgrade or replace.

[strawberry]

What it the reason for upgrading?. Best bet is to install on one and see if it meets your expectatations.

[Steve21]

If anything I'd say it's the RAM and HDD that's going to be the issue. 2GB is min for Win10, and then say Office 2016 (assuming you're using the free upgrade rights) is 2GB too, so that's already 4GB "recommended" without anything like photoshop. (Remember it's going to have to be 64bit even if you aren't using it now, so you'll be looking at all the higher specs)

 

You'd notice a large difference with an SSD n your older processors, than an i3 with a standard HDD etc

 

We've got a lot of the same style of machines (age/spec wise) and found by the time you look at upgrading the HDD to SDD and then finding compatible RAM etc to match what's already in there you end up spending a large amount on old machines that don't make it worthwhile, so we're looking to replace. (As an example even our 2's had 2x 1GB stick so both needing replacing etc).

 

But in terms of your particular setup and what you call reasonable why not just install it on one machine as a test and see? Then it's down to your staff/management to judge if it's that acceptable or find replacement monies!

 

Steve

[steves22]

Planning for Windows 7 eol January 2020. Not that far off really. Agree probably best to try an upgrade ourselves but have been very pressed recently. Was interested in putting budget figures together.

[steves22]

Agreed. Costs were about £100 per machine to upgrade to give us 4Gb and ssd. Important consideration was availability of power supplies being difficult to source. I was thinking of refurbs at around £200 for i3 but ssd would be extra. Recently upgraded some to ssd and to 4gb (keeping w7) but user not impressed with performance. Also bought small number of Lenovos - i5, ssd, 8 gb and these are great. Would like to do same with rest but cost would be over £200,000. Even spread over 2 budget years would be too much to bear.

[3s-gtech]

Our machines are mostly Core 2 Duos with 4GB or more of RAM, we only have SSDs. Performance is excellent in 10. It's not that heavy on a system - I have a little tablet here with an Atom Z3740 and 2GB of RAM and it flies (off domain though).

 

I would say that the essentials are:

Two or more cores

4GB or more of RAM

SSD

DX10 capable onboard or discrete graphics (so stuff like the 945 and 965 is past it).

 

You can meet these specs with some very old machines!

[HereIGoAgain2601]

Best advice I can give you is stay on Windows 7 unless you are putting SSDs in everything. We use windows 10 across the trust of around 2000 devices. The newer ones with SSD are fine, anything with a HDD is slow, login times are terrible first login which in a school nearly everything is a first login. Even if it’s a brand new processor the PC still struggles with Win10. We have had great success replacing RAM and SSD in a lot of our old machines that were only core 2 duos. The speed increase was significant and login times match the brand new machines, the bottleneck is always the HDD.

[MatthewL]

The way I see it, yes Windows becomes end of life but if it still works as long as you aware of the security implications then there is no reason why you cannot keep running. At the end of the day PC's are not open directly on the net and you have a firewall in place, keep your AV etc up to date and ensure all patches are applied you won't run into too many problems. The other way you can sell it is that you need more money in your budget to keep hardware up to date, make them realise.

 

I know I will probably get a bashing for it but I was still pulling Windows 98 machines out of operation in last 8 years that served us well.

[AlanD]

Best advice I can give you is stay on Windows 7 unless you are putting SSDs in everything. We use windows 10 across the trust of around 2000 devices. The newer ones with SSD are fine, anything with a HDD is slow, login times are terrible first login which in a school nearly everything is a first login. Even if it’s a brand new processor the PC still struggles with Win10. We have had great success replacing RAM and SSD in a lot of our old machines that were only core 2 duos. The speed increase was significant and login times match the brand new machines, the bottleneck is always the HDD.

 

This is much in line with our experience. SSD make a makes a big difference - not only in an old machine - but also in a new machine.

 

2GB is tight, Just the OS, AV and Edge with a few windows open can easily use it all up. Doesn't run much or noticeably faster with 4GB - especially if you have an SSD (which you will want) because paging works relatively quickly.

 

Note: OP specified CPU speed of 3Ghz - which doesn't really tell you much - because some of the latest i5 kabylake might only run at 3.4MHz - but seem like 2or 3 times faster than say the first generation of i5 CPus. And i5 with 4 real cores - certainly seems to help more - because there is a lot more multithreaded code in Win 10 etc. We found our core 2 duos (now some 8 or 9 years old) had to be retired

[Ditto]

Best advice in the thread... Stick with Win7 - going to 10 is more likely to lead to incompatibility issues. SSD worth the expense and perhaps can be reused as you move forward. 4GB is a minimum.