I am sure I am not the first one to tell you support for Windows 7 in ending in January 2020. But "What does that mean to your business?" "How do you move to protect your assets?" And "Should you upgrade your old PC with just a software change or get a new PC?" All of these are great questions - now lets explore some answers.
What does it mean
Contrary to popular belief your PC won't die exactly in January 2020 as a result of these license changes. The good news is you PC will continue to run. But the bad news is that you will not get any more security updates. As you are well aware the threat landscape on the future is evolving quickly. New vulnerabilities are discovered all the time. Microsoft has had a history of "Patch Tuesday" releasing periodic protections to you at no charge. Additionally when Microsoft discovers an extreme vulnerability they do what is called "out of band patching." That means that they immediately push out to you computer protections for discovered vulnerabilities that they are now protection. All of this protection will stop in January 2020 for Windows 7.
How do you protect
Next question: How do you move to protect. The easy answer is upgrade - the slightly harder question is what will that do to my software? If you have a current program and are in contact with your software manufacturer or developer they likely already have a new version available. You will need to contact them and get this question answered. If you do have legacy software that is no longer supported an must run it on Windows 7 you need to increase your security posture. That means updating your antivirus, malware protection suite. Additionally you should increase the backup cycle of your critical Windows 7 PC. Multiple and more frequent backups will at least give you a recovery path if trouble flares up.
Upgrade or new PC
Finally the last question: Upgrade my old hardware or buy new? PCs are machines and machines with moving parts eventually break. What is a moving part on a PC? Fans and motor. All PCs have a power supply and there is a fan in there most of the time. Almost all motherboards have a fan that blows continual cool air on your processor. lastly the older style hard drives have a motor in there that spins it like a record player to retrieve and store data. All of these motors if more than 2-3 years are prone to failure. Warranty's on hardware are also expired for older PCs. And for the cost of a new hard drive, new Windows 10 license and the setup to put it into your PC it is usually more cost effective to buy a new PC and just transfer the data. Of course there are a lot more specific variables for your computing environment. Give ACE a call or drop me an email with your questions and I know we will find an answer together Click here
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