14 DAY TRIAL // The United States Department of Defense (US DoD) announced in February this year that it was moving 4 million devices to Windows 10 as part of a plan to increase the security of its systems, including here laptops, desktops, and smartphones.
The US Army is one of the agencies that will migrate to Windows 10, and according to Chief Warrant Officer 5 Brian S. Wimmer, Senior Technical Adviser with NETCOM (the body in charge of the Army Cyberspace), the whole process is treated as a genuine military operation.
Wimmer has told ArmyTimes in a statement that the migration to Windows 10 is projected to complete as “rapidly as feasible,” but a specific deadline hasn’t been offered. All systems are expected to switch to Windows 10 by the end of 2017, though.
Soldiers in Europe will be the first to move to Windows 10 this fall, and when their transition is complete, the upgrade will begin for those in the United States and Southwest Asia, according to the aforementioned source citing Army officials. Groups in the Pacific and Korea region will start the migration to Windows 10 in 2017.
Hardware upgrades necessary
Although the transition is supposed to be seamless for the majority of computers, in some cases, hardware upgrades will be necessary in order to deal with the requirements of the new operating system. Furthermore, there are applications and plug-ins that won’t work with Microsoft Edge, the new default browser in Windows 10, so soldiers will have to install a third-party browser.
Xbox games won’t be available on Windows 10 computers operated by the US Army, and titles such as Candy Crush Saga will be disabled entirely on all systems. Office 2013 will continue to be offered, so the Army won’t have to use the mobile apps available in the store.
Soldiers will also be provided with access to a dedicated website that will come with instructions on the migration to Windows 10, as well as more information on the new features of the operating system in order to ensure a smoother transition.