This is scheduled for release July this year, and it appears that Microsoft is hoping that lots of people will move to it. Since the general dissatisfaction with Windows 8, has resulted in many people waiting, now the computer natives are restless for change, so I think many will take up the offer which is particularly attractive as Microsoft is offering a free upgrade for Windows 7 and newer users who move quick.
For those on early windows like XP, there is no upgrade path, which is fine by me. I would recommend anyone with an XP computer now to seriously think of getting a new computer, particularly if it's a server. Note just because they are old does not mean they cannot be used, what we commonly do is take the old servers, upgrade the windows on them and turn them into register and work stations.
Now business users, tend to be a bit conservative. They have to be as it takes a while to bed an operating system down. Windows 7 took about 10 months before Microsoft released 7.1, and everyone was happy to run with that. I would expect something similar here. If Windows 10 bombs like VISTA, then it could be as much as eight years before everyone is happy with it. So I am expecting that Windows 10 will be for us in a major way at least 10 months away. That is not to say if what we have experienced in the past occurs some of our users will be on Windows 10 at the date of release. Lucky for these people unlike many of our competitors we stick very closely to the Microsoft standards.
Our first impressions on testing is that Windows 10 looks pretty good, but it will get some getting used too as there are quite a few new functions. Some of them are really excellent like they have a little indicator under each icon on the task bar to indicate if the application is running which I think is great. It maintains the original icon, without adding another icon for a running program thus freeing up space on the task bar….pretty good. Still it looks like it will be a support headache as there is a huge number of options. If something goes wrong as everyone will have it set up differently it will be hard to explain what to do. The wording has also changed, which means some of us are going to have to learn some new words, for example ‘My Computer’ is now ‘File Explorer', which sounds familiar….
Overall it's much easier to use then Windows 8 but not Windows 7. So those on the more recent version of Windows may want to move quicker.
About our software, it appears to run on some quick tests. In fact, everything underneath seems to be the same as Windows 7, RDP, VPN, Domain Config, network settings, firewall and sharing. On first inspection, we don’t see any reason why we would have any specific Windows 10 issues. When we get closer to the actual release I will be able to tell you more.
Have a nice day,
