On the 14th January 2020 Microsoft will be ending support for Windows 7.
This doesn’t mean that on the 15th January 2020 your computer will stop working but it does mean that Microsoft will not be releasing any security updates or patches for the operating system.
Security updates and patches are an extremely important line of defence to help protect your PCs and network from viruses and other malware.
As an example, you may remember the WannaCry virus that caused so much disruption to the NHS last year. The vulnerability in Windows that allowed the virus to do so much damage had already been identified and Microsoft had released a “patch” to fix it several months before. Had the NHS had a patch management process in place (like we do for our customers), then the virus would not have been able to cause any harm.
As well as the security reasons there may also be compliance reasons that you need to upgrade from Windows 7. GDPR for example requires that any software you use is still within the support cycle of the manufacturer.
We are therefore strongly recommending to all our customers that they replace any Windows 7 devices for ones running Windows 10 before January 2020.
Whilst it is technically possible to upgrade Windows 7 devices to Windows 10, in many cases it makes more sense to replace the device. If the PC is running Windows 7 it is almost certainly at least 4 years old and therefore by the time you have bought the upgrade and had it professionally installed, you could find you need to replace it shortly afterwards anyway for hardware reasons and would therefore have wasted money.