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Windows 10 Compatibility Issues Forcing US Air Force To Scrap a Significant Number of Computers (betanews.com)
The US Department of Defense has decreed that the Air Force must complete its migration to Windows 10 by March 31 2018. From a report: Failure to do so will result in any systems not running Microsoft's latest operating system being denied access to the Air Force Network. However, because Windows 10 is not compatible with many of the Air Force's existing systems, a significant number of computers will need to be replaced in order to hit the deadline.
I worked for the USAF for 8 years as an Airman and 30 as a civilian. I went from an HP85 for line monitoring at a comm site in 1983 to workstations in an aircraft hangar in 2017. I remember going from win95 to win98 and it was good. We went to win2000 and it was good. XP Pro upgrade was good. Then Vista came.....over 50% of our workstations were down at any one time for over a year. After a few years we got Win7 and it was so wonderful. I use Linux at home but Win7 was as stable as I could wish and a million times better than Vista. They avoided 8 and when I retired last year the big dread was Win10. Nobody likes it at home, I know a bunch of people that bought Macs just because of Win10. I'm glad I'm going to miss that adventure.
Driver incompatibility is the big thing. And it's real - when someone's $2,000 microscope camera works with Win7, but not with Win10, upgrading is painful.
"Slap in a SSD" is great when you have three computers at home. When you're dealing with thousands, the simplest steps become year long projects.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
Windows 10 Enterprise, but thanks for playing. "Secure Hardware Baseline" using TPM 2.0 is what is the big driver. Even systems only a couple of years old are having to be replaced because mfg's not offering updates from TPM 1.2
A better plan is to do gradual upgrades on a schedule.
Yep, cuz when you're managing 1,000+ systems it's much easier to deal with 5-10 different configurations than it is for just 1.
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I've seen it way too many times. The typical argument is "Why do I need to replace the controller, it works fine". The answer is, because it runs on a serial board interface on your old Win 95 machine that just died (22 years later) and the board doesn't fit in any new computer, and nobody makes the software for it or makes a replacement serial board to drive the machine.
The sad thing is, that just might bust the company.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's much easier to deal with 10-20% of your systems being down due to a vendor fuckup than 100%, so I's say yeah that's probably true in this case.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
https://www.amazon.com/StarTec...
The sad thing is, that just might bust the company.
Jeez, it's a real shame nobody ever thought of creating another operating system to save these people from Microsoft's reign of terror.
I am a moron, but you still get a "woosh!" for not realizing I was joking.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A couple of the small businesses I do computer support for have 1990s-era hardware for mission-critical operations. They're not as clueless as you've described. They knew what they were up against, and bought additional compatible computers, boards, and cables as spares while they were still available. These computers aren't networked so there's no security risk. And the old hardware does the job well enough that it'd be silly for them to spend a lot of money upgrading to a modern system.
That's what a lot of people who think like you don't seem to get. A lot of business tasks don't need GHz computers with gigabytes of RAM. And if the computer you've got is handling that job just fine, it's a waste of money to upgrade it. Need I remind you we successfully landed people on the moon a half dozen times using a computer with as much processing power as a modern calculator. Bigger/faster is not always better.
That reminds me of some of the laptop computers I worked on back in the early 1990's. I worked for a well-known laptop manufacturer who made some laptops for the military. The military laptop I worked with was Tempest certified. It had a removable SCSI hard drive where all data on the drive was encrypted. It was a nightmare to take it apart. Once you took off the cover you had to remove all of the RF shielding (128 screws held the RF shielding on, I kid you not!). The screen was an electroluminescent VGA screen with a fine wire mesh in front of it. It was designed so there were no detectable RF emissions. The company's laptops were also quite rugged. One of the other commercial laptops they made was modified to run on the US space shuttle.
The DOD can have a lot of weird hardware requirements and often the current hardware is what we would consider outdated due to the long development times and how long all the approvals and whatnot took.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Use Linux
aaaaaaa
pcmcia cards
I thought these things were a myth.