3 Reasons To Consider Migrating to Windows 8

Why both personal and business PC users should take a second look at Windows 8 Microsoft’s newest operating system

Although some users see Windows as Windows, no matter the version, nothing could be further from the truth. The latest version, Windows 8, has so much more to offer than the others, giving users much more piece of mind.

Many Windows users are hesitant about upgrading to Windows 8 (more specifically, Windows 8.1). But they shouldn’t be. The latest version of Windows is much more robust than previous versions, and offers a host of new capabilities, such as touch-screen integration, vastly improved security and better stability. So if you’re office is still supporting, say, Windows XP or even Windows 7, it may be the time to take the plunge. Both you, your employees and your clients will greatly benefit from it.

1. Previous versions of Windows lack the security, stability, touch-screen capabilities, new apps and cloud integration available in Windows 8.

Windows XP has been in use for more than 12 years and is old and obsolete. Microsoft will cease support for it on April 8, 2014, so PCs still running that version of Windows will no longer receive updates to patch security vulnerabilities. Some new applications only support Windows 7 and Windows 8. Windows XP PCs typically have very dated hardware, including slow processors, low memory and little disk space by today’s standards.

Many Windows XP users won’t migrate because they think they have applications they can’t move because they’ve lost the serial numbers, product keys or installation media; the applications are old and won’t work on newer operating systems; or new version upgrade costs are prohibitive. That’s no longer a problem. There’s a way to make a copy of your Windows XP configuration and migrate it to a new Windows 8 Professional computer so Windows XP runs virtualized, or simulated, in a window. The process is beyond the scope of this article, but if you’re interested, look into installing Hyper-V on Windows 8 and then using Disk2VHD to convert a Windows XP or Windows 7 PC into a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Windows 8 has excellent built-in support for computers with touch screens on tablets and touch-screen all-in-one PCs and hybrid laptops (laptops where the screen can fold over or lay flat, turning the laptop into a tablet).

Microsoft includes gigabytes of free storage in Skydrive, a cloud drive included with Windows 8. If you use Microsoft Office 2013 or Microsoft Office 365, Word and Excel can save and open files directly with Skydrive. That facilitates easy file sharing.

Windows 8 has a store similar to Apple’s Apps Store. Windows 8 gives PC users a whole new world of full-screen, touch-friendly, Web-connected apps to explore. And these new apps can even display relevant information on Windows Start screen tiles, something impossible in Windows 7—or just about any other desktop operating system around.

2. Far greater stability and performance than previous versions of Windows.

I’ve had to rebuild my share of Windows XP and Windows 7 PCs because Windows won’t start and cannot be repaired. Most Windows users have experienced the BSOD (blue screen of death), an uninformative blue screen with white lettering displaying code indecipherable to anyone but a Microsoft programmer.

So far, I’ve seen an average 15 percent increase in speed when I’ve installed Windows 8 on a computer that had been running Windows 7. I have yet to see a BSOD or experienced a crash. Windows 8 is optimized and supports touch screens and works very well with modern graphics and video applications such as Skype. It also offers improved battery life for laptops and has excellent support for SSD drives (solid-state disk drives), the extremely fast electronic replacements for hard drives. System boot are far faster, especially on the newest computers running Windows 8.1. Sleep and hibernation modes work fast and are stable

3. Improvements over previous versions of Windows in security and resistance to malware.

Windows 8 is by far the most secure version of Windows. Security is reason enough alone to upgrade or buy a new Windows 8 PC. Windows 8 includes low-level improvements to make it more difficult for malware to gain unauthorized access to system resources.

These low-level changes eliminate exploit techniques that malware has used in the past to gain higher privileges to PCs. Additionally, these improvements can dramatically reduce the likelihood that newly discovered vulnerabilities will result in successful exploits.

Windows 8 has Internet Explorer 10, and Windows 8.1 has Internet Explorer 11, which are hardened against malware embedded in web pages. Windows 8 addressed known exploit techniques and makes it more difficult for malware writers to create new ones.

Rootkits have literally been designed out of the threat landscape and in the increasingly unlikely event of a malware intrusion, Windows 8 is more capable to detect and remove it. To your organization, this means improved client uptime, reduced support costs and fewer security risks.

Overall, Windows 8 is a vast improvement over past versions of Windows. It runs faster, has advanced technology such as touch-screen integration and is more secure than any other iteration of Windows. It also supports Microsoft’s Skydrive, a cloud-based storage and collaboration environment. So to make the most of your computing infrastructure, Windows 8 is the way to go.d

Read more of David’s articles:

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Small Business Move To Cloud? 8 Factors Say NO.

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