Windows 10 support ended. What a five-person shop does now

The computer keeps working. Your programs keep opening. Nothing changes on Tuesday morning. What changes is that every new hole found in Windows from here on stays open on your machine forever, while it gets patched on everyone else's.

Criminals know this. Unsupported systems are the easiest way into a small business, because the way in is documented, public and never closed. For a shop with a point of sale, customer records or a bank login on that machine, that is the real exposure.

Walk around and count. Most five-person businesses have more computers than they think once you include the one at the counter, the one in the back office and the laptop someone takes home. For each one, write down the model, roughly how old it is, and what it is used for.

Then check whether each can run Windows 11. Microsoft's PC Health Check app tells you in a minute. Machines from roughly 2018 onward usually pass. Older ones often fail on a security chip requirement, and that failure is not worth fighting.

If a machine passes the check, the upgrade to Windows 11 is free and mostly painless. Back it up first, run the upgrade after hours, and expect to reinstall a printer or two. Your programs almost always carry over.

Do them one at a time, starting with the computer that matters least. If something odd happens with your accounting software or your label printer, you find out on the machine you can live without.

An office computer that can't run Windows 11 is usually six or more years old. It was due anyway. A new business-class desktop or laptop is not an exotic purchase, and it comes with Windows 11, a warranty and a few years of runway.

The part people skip is the move. Files, the browser passwords, the email setup, the scanner, the one program only that computer has. That is where we spend most of the time on a replacement, and it is where the do-it-yourself version goes wrong.

Don't keep a Windows 10 machine on the network because it only runs the one old program. If that program truly can't move, the machine comes off the internet and off the shared network, and it lives alone. That is a real option for a plotter or a lab instrument, not for the counter PC.

Don't buy the cheapest consumer laptop at a big-box store for the business. It will come with trial software, a slow drive and a home edition of Windows that cannot be managed properly. The business version costs a little more and saves the difference the first time it needs support.

Don't put this off until something breaks. The breaking is the part that costs money.

A quick way to prioritize: rank each machine by what it touches. The counter computer handles payments and customer names, so it goes first. The office computer holds the books and the email, so it is a close second. The laptop that mostly browses and prints comes last, unless it also logs into the bank.

Then look at the software on each one. A point-of-sale system, a shop management program, or an old scanner driver can be the thing that decides whether you upgrade in place or replace. Call the vendor and ask one question: is it supported on Windows 11? If the answer is no and the vendor has no plan, that is a business decision, not a computer decision, and it is better to have it now than during a failed upgrade.

Write all of this on one sheet: machine, age, passes the check or not, what it runs, and the plan. That sheet is most of the project. The rest is scheduling.

Once every machine is on a supported version, keeping them that way is routine: updates applied on a schedule, backups checked, antivirus that actually reports back, and someone who notices when a machine starts failing before it dies.

That is the quiet work we do for the businesses we support in Lake and Porter County. If you'd rather have a list of your machines and a plan than figure it out between customers, that is a one-visit job and we'll put it in writing.