Windows 7 support has ended and it's time for Windows 10. Do You Upgrade That 10 year old windows 7 computer ? My advise is no, your better to go into a New More Updated Computer With Faster Speed.

Windows 7 support has ended and it's time for Windows 10. Do You Upgrade That 10 year old windows 7 computer ? My advise is no, your better to go into a New More Updated Computer With Faster Speed.

First this post is meant to give advise to all of my Ham Radio friends that use computers or have them in their ham shacks. I have been a Computer Service Technician since 1996 and was an Electronic Technician from 1984 to 1996. Every day we see customers come in and they have an old windows 7 computer and are asking whether to upgrade it to windows 7 or buy a newer more updated computer running Windows 10.

 Well where I work I am seeing the sales people charge them to upgrade to windows 10 and clone to a new ssd or solid state hard drive, plus upgrade the memory as far as it can go. The problem with this is yes the ssd drive make make the system run a little faster, but is it going that much faster.

 In the older computer you have what is called the front side buss speed. This is how fast the data travels between the microprocessor and the memory. The older computer may have the older ddr2 or ddr3 memory and the microprocessor is much slower than today's microprocessors. Cloning to the ssd drive is not going to change that, so I do not recommend doing this for a couple of reasons.

 First the customer needs to purchase windows 10 home or pro, add the ssd drive, cloning labor and adding the memory. By the time all this is done you will have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 to $700 dollars. The new computer plus transferring data costs would be just about the same price, so it is not cost effective. The second problem that arises, is that the older computer starts to develop problems with the older system. I see various things like the system intermittently freezes or crashes with a blue screen  error and that are only a few problems.

 One of the things they do where I work is not sell the customer a package of windows 10. No they are installing this using a burned windows 10 cd, which is an oem version from an iso file. This is totally illegal with Microsoft, since the Free Windows 10 Upgrade ended in 2016. In fact if you go to Microsoft you will see that when someone questions them about upgrading to windows 10 now, they said the person would have to purchase the windows 10 software and used the new license key number and software to perform the upgrade. If you are interested in what Microsoft says click this link  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12435/windows-10-upgrade-faq

 Okay so my advise is purchase a new windows 10 computer, whether Desktop or Laptop and reinstall your programs. You can also move your data such as documents, pictures, music, videos, email and favorites to the new computer. You can use a docking station with your old sata hard drive and move the data manually. Another option is to mount the hard drive in the new computer and transfer data. You can use a program like the free unstoppable copier, but check the data when it's done to make sure all data bulk copied. You also have to make sure to uncheck the two places to remove the attributes. There are other programs out there where you perform the same transfer. Some of your old office programs like the 2003 and earlier should be upgraded to the new version. Quickbooks and Quicken have to be upgraded to the new versions.

 So in the long run, it is better to go into the newer computer and maybe recycle the old windows 7 out dated computer.