If you like to punish yourself you can now upgrade your computer to the Windows 11 Beta release and test out the latest instalment from Microsoft operating system. There are plenty of tech heads who will find this a really exciting proposition being one of the first to see what new features Microsoft has launched and writing reviews on them ad nauseum.

Whether you like it or not this will be something that you will have to do and better start planning now. Microsoft strategy with cloud deployments and monthly fees is that they try to get everyone on the latest version of their software’s so that they don’t have to support legacy systems.

Windows 7 was officially end of life and no longer supported by Microsoft in January 2020 yet at the time of writing there are still about 20% of all PC’s globally running this operating system. Much of this is because corporate standards and policies state the operating system that needs to be used. However corporates still running Windows 7 should consider the legal implications from running software that is not supported by the manufacturer. A hack or ransomware attack on these systems may mean your insurance is not valid. That can be considered as corporate mismanagement so should be seriously reviewed.

In addition there will be no straight upgrade from Win 7 to Win 11 as you will most likely need to perform a fresh install which means a lot of settings and potentially data gets lost if not performed carefully.

From Win 10 to Win 11 there will be an upgrade path but I would still strongly recommend that any user performs a full backup of all data and settings prior to running the upgrade.

So this brings me to the “should I upgrade” question. They answer here is that at some point you will have to but be extremely careful not to blindly accept updates as suddenly you may be running a Win 11 upgrade by accident which will probably lock you out of your machine for a considerable amount of time whilst the upgrade works. Any upgrade should be done when you have plenty of time.

My review of the enhancements that come with Win 11 really are not corporate focused and seem to benefit the home user or the gamer. There are few benefits for business use, that is not to say there are none but the reality is you are more likely going to get frustrated by the fact that things are not where they used to be rather than being amazed that this new feature is available. I predict the majority of Win 10 to Win 11 users will try to set their Win 11 interface to replicate Win 10. I will try to write a blog on that later.

If I was pushed to give a response as to where Microsoft should be spending its development resources it would definitely be to get them to resolve the issue of a single user having multiple Microsoft O365 accounts. I personally have 4 and it is a nightmare trying to interchange between them whilst having multiple calendars and quite frankly Microsoft Teams simply does not work well if you have more than one account on the same device. Microsoft please fix this before you start adding enhanced screen resolution for gamers or integrating Xbox Game Pass. Please spend as much time on Business Enhancements as you do Home User Enhancements and stop moving things to places we cant find them.