"There's an opportunity here.That is to get the virtualisation bug early in your planning"

As Windows 10's decade-long reign ends, firms must make big decisions on how to introduce Windows 11. Steve offers a novel suggestion

- STEVE CASSIDY

It’s remarkable to note how long a gap there’s been between Windows versions. Windows 10 was released in 2015. I don’t know how you feel about this but I was more shocked by ten years of Windows 10 than I was to hear that Clint Eastwood is now 95 years old. I’m sorry to say that I have no concrete advice for Mr Eastwood, but I do have a few things to say about Windows 10 and its successors. How should you react to the propaganda, and what should you do to ensure a smooth migration?

First of all, let’s agree that there’s an ideal number of nice new Windows 11 desktop PCs to buy when beginning a rollout. That ideal number isn’t zero, nor is it one per member of staff. Initially, I think a sensible starting point for pretty much every firm is around half a dozen machines. This is because my preferred pathway through an upgrade such as this is certainly not putting one app at a time on the new codebase and then seeing if your Excel macros still work; for one thing, that’s an excellent way to eat through many overnight marathons, just reloading the OS on the new machines so that your next app starts from a clean install.

Those half a dozen new PCs are for testing virtualisation as a response to the withdrawal of support for Windows 10. I would expect most 2025 desktop PCs to be able to support anything up to four different VMs at a time, perhaps with a few extra memory sticks and a secondary hard disk. You add the Hyper-V role to the machine build and then pick your favourite machine translator utility. I’ve become a big fan recently of the StarWind V2V converter (tinyurl.com/375starwind). This helps you to move either workstation VMs or full server VMs around the most commonly found formats of VM on-disk structures, which sounds quite enough like miracle-working to me already.