Gartner has urged endpoint computing managers and CIOs to begin their migration from Windows 7 now to avoid the problems many faced when migrating from Windows XP.
In a blog post, Stephen Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, announced that the end of support for Windows 7 will be January, 2020, assuming there are no changes to its current support life cycle. “While this feels like it’s a long way off, organisations must start planning now, so they can prevent a recurrence of what happened with Windows XP,” reported IT Pro Portal.
Since the end of support for XP in April of this year, organisations have been slow to adopt Windows 7 and even slower to install Windows 8, Gartner said. Kleynhans recommended organisations: deploy Windows 8 on new PCs as they arrive; skip Windows 8 and plan to deploy a future version of Windows; and deploy Windows 8 on all PCs to eliminate Windows 7.