There is rage on the internet, my friends. It's all about the dreaded replacement cycle that we are facing now.
No, I'm not talking about the upcoming presidential election. I'm talking about your operating system upgrades.
ED BOTT
The year-long free upgrade offer for Windows 10 ends on July 29. But what if you're not ready to upgrade yet?
My Facebook and Twitter feed is littered with hemming and hawing over prompting to upgrade. Refusal to capitulate to the prompt that it needs to be done, anger over invasion of one's personal space. Desperate pleading to be left alone, despondence over presumed unnecessary workday and life disruption.
There's a final stage to Kübler-Ross after bargaining and depression, you know.
I get it. You don't want your software updated or upgraded. You believe your system is static, that if it works now, it will continue to work the same as it does always. You don't want to change, because that would mean acquiring new skills, or doing something differently.
Or worse -- the possibility of having to spend money. You'll be damned if that awful, evil vendor makes you spend more of your hard-earned cash.
If it isn't broke don't fix it. Because if this approach "works" for the federal government, it's got to work perfectly well for you, right?
Traditionally, when we think in terms of computer systems and software, at least prior to the last decade or so, computer software was very much a static thing. Software upgrades for operating systems and application packages happened at four year intervals, frequently even longer.
When did you update or upgrade an operating system? Usually if a catastrophic failure occurred and you had to replace the hardware, and you didn't have the original install media.
Dead hard disk? Upgrade time. Blown mainboard? New PC. New PCs came with new OSes. And that often necessitated updated versions of the apps.
End-users, small businesses and enterprises all dealt with it in different ways, because of the types of tools and expertise and processes available to them. Some were more naturally resistant to making the changes, some more progressive.
WATCHDOG SAYS
Three-quarters of the government's IT budget goes to supporting legacy systems, some of which date back to the 1970s.
Certain environments were better equipped to resist or deploy upgrades than others. A lot of this was defined by application workload and the speeds in which 3rd-party vendors that could certify their products to run on an upgraded environment. There was also the issue that you might have hardware and peripherals that just plain would not work with the new software.
Those of us who have been in information technology or using PCs as end-users since those days know that mindset well. So we've been indoctrinated to it, and it's often hard to think out of that box.
The problem with having that historical perspective is that the mindset of "I'll wait until it breaks to deal with it" no longer works in an internet-connected world.
Routine operating system and software upgrades must be considered as part of the natural life cycle of systems management, whether you are an end-user, a small business, or an enterprise.
And while the pace at which we deploy these things is going to be different based on overall impact -- with end-users being the best equipped to handle frequent updates and upgrades versus an enterprise -- we now need to think of operating systems and the accompanying applications as more of a software appliance that is actively updated by the vendor, as part of the overall internet of things.
You accept that this happens all the time on your smartphone, your tablet, your video game console and perhaps even your smart thermostat, which does this without you even knowing about it. (Although, to be fair, there's grumbling even over those upgrades.) Your modern PC is no different, and it needs to do this for the same reasons.
The previous generation of PC operating systems -- especially Windows XP, which came out in 2001 -- is ill-equipped to deal with the constant threats emerging from the internet. The browser technology is outdated, and the underlying security platform even more so.
Ultimately, this is the reason why all sorts of upgrades are being pushed on you now, because the industry wants to take proactive measures against these threats, and to move you to a more modernized code base which is better equipped to handle them. It also reduces the overall support burden to by not keeping these legacy operating systems and applications alive.
So yes, take the free upgrade, particularly while it is still free. You will be much safer, and much happier for it.