Windows 10 has been publicly available since 29th July 2015. Since then, Microsoft have been encouraging users to upgrade in many ways – consumers had a year window to upgrade from Windows 7/8/8.1 for free, along with Windows Update prompts reminding consumers that they can do so.

There’s always going to be complaints with any new operating system, but the in-place upgrade process has been the best yet from Microsoft. Gone are the days when any IT professional would strongly avoid it, it’s a much more stable and revertable method.

The upgrade has been optional, but we’re now getting much closer to being forced to go Windows 10 (not that I think this is a bad thing). The two big ways this is happening are:

New PCs with Windows 7 or 8.1 are going to be much less common come November 1, 2016. The top OEM vendors won’t be allowed to do this anymore (E.g. Lenovo, HP, Dell). You could still go to a whitebox builder and buy an OEM version of Windows 7, it just won’t be a pre-packaged option anymore. Windows 7 is very old now, and it’s unrealistic to expect Microsoft as well as all the hardware manufacturers to continue supporting it with new drivers.

The other main driver is Intel’s 7th generation of i series chip, Kaby Lake. This has already been released and seen in some laptops, with desktop CPUs due to be released early 2017. Microsoft is drawing a line in the sand and saying there will be no support at all if you’ve got this new CPU. I have yet to get my hands on a device with these new CPUs to try, so it will be interesting to see if anything breaks with this combination of OS and CPU.

Windows 7 has had a very good run, with great reasons; but the vast improvements that have taken us to Windows 10 (not to mention the better security architecture), as well as internal support for cloud services means this is the way of the future.

If you haven’t started the transition to Windows 10 it’s time to get planning, before you hit the above roadblocks and haven’t put the planning and preparation into the change.