 Welcome to Upgrading Your Windows Operating System, Things to Know That You're Afraid to Ask. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup Global. I've been with the organization for now nearly 7 years prior to that having been on staff at three small nonprofits in the Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California areas. I was often the accidental techie having to make technology decisions for my small organizations without a lot of tech expertise. So I'm happy to be your host on these events where I hope to bring you experts that can help answer your questions and help you operate at your full potential. Joining us today also, we are joined by Linda Wittep who is the Director of Technology Services at Tech Impact, one of TechSoup Global's partners. And she manages all aspects of client relations including providing nonprofits with project plans, budget development, implementation oversight, and resource allocation to projects. So she works with local, regional, and national partners to provide the nonprofit community with increased knowledge of technology through events like this and we're happy to have her join us. We also are joined today by Sarah Cade, the President of PC Rebuilders and Recyclers in Chicago. They are a Microsoft authorized refurbisher and have been working with TechSoup as one of our refurbisher sources for our Refurbish Computer Initiative. She also coordinates the Electronic Reuse Summit, the annual conference for refurbishers, and travels around the world talking about and helping promote registered refurbisher programs. So we're happy to have her with us as an expert and somebody who runs an organization that is always upgrading machines and helping to keep them in use and extend their end of life so that we are not filling our landfills with so much tech junk. You'll also see on the back end Ali Bezdikian who is an Interactive Events and Video Producer here at TechSoup Global. She'll be on hand to flag your questions and help you with any tech issues throughout. So TechSoup is here in San Francisco. Tech Impact is off on the East Coast in Philadelphia and we're representing the Central Time Zone as well where Sarah is located in Chicago. So go ahead and chat into us to let us know where you're joining us. Are you in the Bahamas where I have that other arrow pointed? That's where I always wish I am. Go ahead and let us know where you're joining. Right now we have a little more than 70 people on the line and that will continue to climb in the next few minutes. But so far we've got people from North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, Utah, Ohio, North Carolina, New York, Canada, all over the place. So thank you so much for chatting in and joining us today. We're glad to have you with us. A look at our introduction. We'll do an introduction to TechSoup quickly. We'll then talk about why upgrade, requirements for upgrading, which upgrade to select, how to actually do it, share some resources, and then talk about how you can get upgrades or full operating systems if you need them. And if you find that your hardware is just not upgradeable based on what you learn in today's webinar, we'll talk about where you can get some hardware and how you can get support. We'll have time for Q&A at the end. So TechSoup is a global nonprofit working in 121 countries with 63 partners. Check out our 2014 year in review to see all of the work that we're doing around the world. It's really quite impressive. And having been a user of TechSoup services before, I'm proud that we are expanding around the world to create a time when every social benefit organization has the technology, resources, and knowledge it needs to operate at its full potential. We do that in a variety of ways, including these kinds of webinars and through our donation programs which have delivered tech products and grants in the tune of nearly $5 billion to the NGO and social good sectors. You can learn more about that at TechSoup.org and about our donation programs there. Now to you, our participants. This will help our presenters get an idea and our participants get an idea of where you're at in operating system technology. So go ahead and click on any of these that you're currently running. And this could be if you have an office of five people or if you have an office of 500 people. Go ahead and let us know what you're using. And Deborah comments in the chat which we know you can't see what everybody else is commenting. So if people share anything useful that we think is good for everybody to read, we'll share that back out to you. But Deborah comments in chat, don't forget us Apple people. And we certainly aren't. Today is going to be focused though on upgrading your Windows operating system which is the name of the event. But we will show a little bit down the road and we do want to know if you're running Mac operating systems of where you can get upgrades if you need them. So I'll give just a few more seconds so everyone can participate. And so far it looks like the great majority are running either XP or Windows 7. So that's great that so many of you are already running Windows 7 and that there's still a sizable trunk that are on XP or Vista. Sorry, Vista folks, I feel for you. I know a lot of us lived on Windows XP for many years and are still using it, but the time has come to really think about getting off of it soon as support has died. And we'll talk more about that in a few minutes. Two more questions for you here. How many computers do you need to upgrade? Are you looking at just a couple or maybe fewer than 10? Or are you in an office that has 100 or more than 300? We really are using this as an opportunity just to get an idea of the scale of the upgrade processes that you are needing to undertake or considering. So go ahead and answer that. I'll give just a few more seconds and then we'll get on to the meat of today's presentation. So it looks like the great majority are less than 10 or even one or two. So that's great to know. Most of you on the line with us are joining us from smaller organization situations. Now for those joining us from 50 or 100 or more, we'll do our best to try and answer your questions, but obviously it's a smaller percentage of the people that are on the line with us. So we may answer those on the back end or they may be so specific that we need to take it offline after. So last question before we move on. In your role, how much time do you spend doing hands-on technology work at your org? Are you a full-time tech person, part-time? Are you as needed? Do you perform an accidental techie role, which was always my specialty of having really no tech expertise and yet being the person that always had to do it? Are you not a tech person at all? And maybe you're not likely to be the person that would do the upgrades? Or if you have something else to say, go ahead and chat that into us. And again, just give a few more seconds so everybody can weigh in. And I will show the results here. So really helpful to know that the great majority are either accidental techies or as needed tech support. So for those of you that are full-time IT people, you may find that some of what we cover might be a little bit more basic than your expertise, but hopefully there will still be some good information and resources that you can glean from today's event as well. With that, I'd like to go ahead and welcome our speakers to the line and get us moving with how to go forth in upgrading your Windows operating system. Welcome, Linda. We're so glad to have you on the program. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, Becky. I hope everybody can hear me very well, and we'll get started with Windows operating system. So my background is 25-plus years with Microsoft operating system starting with DOS moving through all of the different operating systems that Microsoft has put out over the years. So we'll be talking about a couple of things today. Why upgrade? Requirements needed to do the upgrade. Which operating system is best for your organization or for your use? And then I'm going to pass it over to Sarah to talk to you about how to actually do the work. I talk about the work, she does the work. That's how it works. So isn't that a cute baby? I'm so excited. Here we go. So why upgrade? First, I wanted to talk to you just a little bit about some facts about operating systems. If you're an accidental techie and you're not trained in technology support with A-plus certifications and all of that, I thought we could start by just kind of defining what the operating system does for the computer. Your operating system performs the very basic fundamental tasks that connect your hardware, which is your laptop or your PC, to the software that you want to use. Those systems like Microsoft Word or Excel or your email or your web browser, that kind of thing. So it performs very basic tasks, recognizing input from the keyboard and your mouse, sending output to the display screen. All of those things are done by the operating system. Your operating system also keeps track of all the files and directories. When you open up Windows Explorer, everything, all of that disk, all of those files that are saved there are organized by the operating system. So again, the history of Microsoft operating systems, the disk operating system, the thing that Bill Gates made all of his money on was the disk operating system. And then moving towards a Windows environment, Apple Mac had the first Windows environment. I'll give a shout out there where shouts do. Windows 3.1, if anybody remembers that, was kind of the first big one that everybody who could get a PC could get on, loaded on. And then we moved to Windows 98, and then we moved to Windows Millennium. Raise your hand if you remember Windows Millennium. Then Windows XP came out in around 2003, followed by Windows Vista 7, and now we're up to 8.1. Windows 10 is on the horizon. We're not going to talk about that today because it's not actually out yet. So just again, this is a background of operating systems. So let's talk about Windows XP specifically. Windows XP, as I said, debuted in 2002, which is 12 years ago, embraced by everyone who suffered through Windows Millennium Edition. And it had a new desktop interface. So up until that point we had a user interface that looked a little bit different. That was all well and good, but Windows XP is 12 years old. Look at him. He's a little old man with a cane and everything. Windows XP is 2 years old. That's 2 years longer than Microsoft has supported any other system in their history, okay? Because I think that the public is saying, no, let us keep Windows XP, but there's problems with that. The next couple of slides we'll talk about are about the problems with keeping Windows XP in your network now. Microsoft stopped support on April 8, 2014, which is almost one year ago, which means that they are not putting out any new security updates. In fact, hackers, malware, spyware, virus creators, all those evil people in the world had already developed attacks that attacked the vulnerabilities of Windows XP and set to launch those on April 9, 2014. They've been doing so ever since. So if you're using Windows XP right now, your system and therefore your network are vulnerable to many, many hacks and viruses. So for that reason alone, you should not be using Windows XP. Another reason not to use Windows XP, technology. Technology moves and changes. And the way that the computing world works is that you, the user, drive innovation. So you say, geez, this mouse thing I have is really cool, but what I'd really like is a tablet computer where I can actually use my finger and touch the screen and do things that way. Well, Windows XP can't handle that kind of thing because once you tell the manufacturers what you want, the hardware people develop it, and then the software has to create things like drivers to control that interface or that peripheral that you want to have. Those Bluetooth wireless things that you want to use on your system won't work with Windows XP because that's the way innovation works. Productivity. This is a little bit harder to see. It's a behind the scenes thing that newer operating systems have that Windows XP doesn't have. Things like automatic maintenance to optimize your performance. With Windows XP, you have to schedule tasks like disk cleanup and defragmentation and those things that keep your operating system running smoothly and your hardware performing at the optimum. The new versions, Windows 7 and Windows 8, do that automatically. That automatic save that happens when we're using Microsoft Word or Excel or QuickBooks or anything like that, not available in older operating systems. So you have to remember to click save on your document. So those are kind of things that are behind the scenes that you might not notice, but are big improvements to newer operating systems. User interface upgrades like I mentioned earlier, Bluetooth or wireless mice and keyboards, touch screens, dual monitors, that kind of thing that we're so used to now are not available. The last thing is support. There are many IT firms including Tech Impact. We run a help desk for nonprofits here and we made a decision and we told everybody that we support. Listen, we're not going to take phone calls about Windows XP anymore because you're vulnerable to bringing down the whole network if you don't upgrade. So we've made a big stride towards getting rid of XP operating systems at everybody that we support because there's no fix available. It's hard for any IT firm to get a call from somebody that's using Windows XP that says such and such is not working or my system has been compromised when we can't find a fix for it. Microsoft isn't putting out those fixes. Time intensive. So why pay more to support an old system? You can upgrade instead. Upgrading could be as easy as going through TechSoup, requesting a donation of a newer version, Windows 7 or Windows 8, and installing it on your existing machine or you may just want to go out and buy a new or refurb machine because they're very inexpensive that would handle the Windows 7 or the Windows 8. It's well worth the money to pay to do that than it is to try to fix the Windows XP or leave your whole entire network vulnerable to hacks and attacks. Becky, I just want to check in here. I haven't been looking at the chat. Anything I need to address? Nope, I think we're good to keep moving. Alrighty, I'm going to thank you. So upgrade requirements. We'll talk a little bit about an upgrade requirement. There's two terms that software manufacturers use when telling you how to install and upgrade to their system. One of them is a minimum spec or a minimum requirement and the other one is recommended requirement. Minimum is just that. It's the bare minimum required to run the operating system and it does not take into account all those other things that you want to run on your system like your email and your web browser and your QuickBooks and your Microsoft Excel and all those things. So minimum requirements are not normally how we help nonprofits choose a new system. But here they are. One gigahertz or faster processor. So when we're looking at the processors for Windows 7 or Windows 7 which is what we're looking at here. Oh wait, Becky told me I could have a little thing. There it is. So for the Windows 7 minimum specs, one gigahertz or faster. So you could run Windows 7 on a Pentium 4 computer or higher. One gigabyte of RAM. RAM is the memory that's required to run all the programs simultaneously on your computer. One gigabyte of RAM is the minimum here. 16 gigabytes of available disk space. This means that the operating system itself requires 16 gigabytes of disk space. We have to factor in that this doesn't include any of your other programs and it also doesn't include any of the updates that are coming to Windows 7. So we want to make sure that we've got plenty of disk space available there. The Windows 8 minimum specs are similar. The processor is still at a one gigahertz minimum. However, it's got to have these other things. PAE, NX, and SSE2 have our requirements within the processor. So we're looking at something like a Duo Core or an i-series processor for that. One gigabyte of RAM, minimum 16 gigabytes. And now this extra, now we move to Windows 8, we've got this extra minimum requirement which is a graphic card which is your video card, Microsoft DirectX 9 or higher with some kind of driver. So to run Windows 8, you require an additional thing which is this video card. There are other specifications if you want to run different things like the touch screen functionality, etc. So now let's talk about recommended specs. Recommended specs actually allow you to use the computer for meaningful work. So I surveyed our technicians and I got these recommended specs, 2 gigahertz or faster for Windows 7, 2 gigahertz or faster processor. We would recommend nothing less than an i-series to run your operating system and do all that other stuff that you want to do at the same time. 4 gigabytes of RAM at a minimum. Oh, that should say 4 gigabytes of RAM there as well. I'll talk to you about 32 versus 64 bit in a minute. 200 gigabyte disk space at a minimum just for the operating system. If you want to add to that you can go ahead and do that. Windows 8, again we want to have that i-series processor in there. We recommend 8 gigabytes of RAM. If you can get a machine with 8 gigabytes of RAM we highly recommend it. 500 gig hard disk, the graphics driver, and then again the additional specifications for certain features. You can find that on the Microsoft website. Okay, so how do we choose which is right for us? Well, Windows 7 or Windows 8, which is right. Windows 7 looks and feels more like the other Microsoft operating systems that you're used to. So it's got a familiar user interface. It's got that start button that we've grown accustomed to. It's got that desktop look and feel that we've grown accustomed to. We can kind of follow along with not much training. If we're upgrading from Windows XP or Vista, especially Vista, and we move to Windows 7, it looks and feels similar. Windows 7 will run on older equipment. So you saw in the last couple of slides that those recommended or minimum specifications were a little bit lower than for the Windows 8. Windows 8 is a completely different user interface. And it's got this thing called the start screen which I have a picture of here which looks completely different than the desktop. It's got these tiles, and who knows what to do, and I can't find all my stuff. So it kind of is off-putting to some users that don't want to upgrade to Windows 8. There's plenty of work around that we can do with the Windows 8. We can remove the start screen entirely. We can customize the start screen so that it's very easy for our users to find those programs that they use all the time and every day. And if you can see here, you see this little picture of the bird in the water. That's my desktop. If I click on that tile, it just brings me into a desktop and it looks kind of like Windows 7 or Vista anyway. So there's just this little bit of user training and we're right back to being productive. The other reason to move to Windows 8 is that the touch screen feature works very well. I have a Windows Surface tablet. I can use my finger and touch any one of these tiles here and open up the program. I can use my finger and swipe just like I could on another type of tablet with another type of operating system on it. And the other reason to use Windows 8 is that it's designed to use apps. So everybody is all about the apps now. They're apps store this and the apps on this or whatever. Microsoft Windows 8.1 uses, you can go to the Microsoft Store and find apps that can help you be more productive which can't do necessarily in the older operating systems. So okay, we're going to talk about bits for a minute. I'm trying not to be technical here but Windows operating systems are available in two different versions. There's a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version. And oftentimes when you're going to select your, you're going to the TechSoup website and you're trying to select the one that's right for you, you're not sure what's the difference. Well, processes, these bits are the number and size of requests from the operating system to the processor. So requests either come in a 32-bit package or they come in 64-bit packages. 64-bit operating systems process more requests and they process those requests faster than the 32-bit. So which would you rather have? 32-bit, slower, 64-bit, faster. The answer is usually 64-bit. The caveat here is that you may have an older what they call legacy program running on your computer that would not be able to run in the 64-bit version. So that's the only thing that you have to know about that. RAM, memory allows, you know, RAM allows the computer to run more programs at the same time. So you can have more Windows open, more programs working, and still be productive. With a 32-bit operating system, the operating system can only recognize and handle 3.7 gigabytes of RAM. So if you go by my recommended specs where I say to run Windows 8, you should have 8 gigabytes of RAM or to run Windows 7, you should have 4 gigabytes of RAM. You're paying for RAM to be installed in that computer that the operating system can't actually use. So therefore moving to the 64-bit version of that allows you to use up to 192 gigabytes of RAM. So your operating system can take full advantage of that memory that you purchased. So that's what I'm trying to say there. I'll stop here for another second. Are there any questions, Becky, that I need to answer about bits and versions? Well, Carrie Ann asked for a more definition on what's a legacy program. Okay, so that's a great question. We use the word legacy to mean old because it sounds better than old, I guess. A legacy program would be a program that you purchased way back when in say 2002 or 2003 that the developers of the program, the software, have not made any upgrades to it so that it will work on the newer operating system. So therefore you might be limited as to whether or not you can upgrade. And if you can, you probably have to use the 32-bit version because to rewrite the program for 64-bit takes these software developers a lot of time and energy. With one other quick question that was a clarification on the specs slide on this minimum versus recommended specs. Dorothy asked, is it 200GB or 20GB recommended? And I think she's talking about this section here where it says 200GB here or 20GB. So just to clarify which of those is correct. Yeah, I missed a zero. It's 200GB for the recommended disk space regardless of 32 or 64-bit. Okay, that's great. So we can make a correction to that in the deck that we'll send out in the follow-up email. We'll make sure that extra zero is there. So just note that. Okay, with that let's go ahead and move forward to those steps. Okay, Sarah I think we can turn it over to you. Thank you. Hi everyone. This is Sarah Cade from PC Rebuilders and Recyclers. As Becky mentioned, the amount of Chicago in my company is a Microsoft authorized refurbisher and recycler. So our job is to take any unwanted computer equipment and refurbish and reuse as much as possible before the rest goes for material recovery. So I love today's topic because we are reusing computers and my goal in life is to try to reuse as much as we can. So if I can help you reuse your systems in your offices, that just makes my day. So we're pretty lucky. When we look at upgrading an operating system, Microsoft has made it pretty easy for us and has actually come out with step-by-step instructions that help you walk through the entire process. We're going to provide you those links later on in our resource section. But what I've done is I took an example of one and want to walk through it with you to help you understand what it looks like and to show you that it's not really that scary. So step one. So what I thought we'd do is just sort of use an example. Let's pretend that I have a nonprofit in San Diego because the weather is much better. And we have an admin computer there that is still running XP. The administrator is only part-time and when they work there they only do basic word processing. They check email. They do some Excel work. But really, they're not on that computer that much. So even though they're still on XP, I don't want to have to spend the money and buy a brand new system. So what I'd like to do is try to upgrade them to Windows 7 first. See if that'll work. So first step in upgrading your system is making sure that all of our programs and the hardware itself will work with Windows 7. So what Microsoft has done is they've come up with a free Windows 7 upgrade advisor as you'll see the link there. And what this does is it provides a report with a report of any issues or any recommendations on what you need to do before you perform your upgrade. So as Linda mentioned before, say you have a program on there that is a legacy program and doesn't have an update. It's going to let you know that before you do the upgrade so that you can take out any data that you need or figure out what you're going to do to transition to say a new program that is supported on Windows 7. So say we do our step one, we run our Windows upgrade advisor. We're pretty excited because our system looks great. It's a Core 2 Duo. It had 2 gigs of RAM but we added an extra 2 gigs so we've got 4 gigs of RAM and we are ready to go and we're ready to upgrade to Windows 7. Step two is where we sort of get organized. We want to make sure that we are saving our files and we're copying our settings. And you can really do this in 2 ways. The first is you can use a Windows Easy Transfer which is just a download that will help you move your files from the settings that you currently have to your brand new install. And we'll give you the link for that later. Or you can actually copy manually your files to an external USB drive before you start your new install. I actually recommend doing both of these. I'm kind of a nervous person and I like to have the more backups the better just in case something happens. We also at this point want to gather all of our program disks. So like I said, my admin uses Office on her system. She may also use QuickBooks. So what I want to do is I want to gather all of the program disks and I want to gather all of the product keys to make sure that when I install my new OS that I have all of the programs and their disks to be able to install on there so she can get back to work quickly. I've got everything together. I'm all backed up and I'm ready to install Windows 7. So as Linda mentioned, I went to the TechSoup website. I purchased the donation of the new media for installing and upgrade for Windows 7. And I've decided that I'm going to go with the 32-bit Windows 7 Pro upgrade and I'm pretty excited. There are some things that we'll want to remember here. The first being that you'll want to make sure that the system is connected to the Internet so you can get all the latest upgrades and updates to the OS. You'll also want to make sure that you've chosen and that you get your latest version of an antivirus. Microsoft does have a free antivirus called Microsoft Internet Essentials. So if you don't have one or don't want to pay for one, that's one that you can look into. And then thirdly, you want to make sure that you have your 25-digit product key. This is located on a sticker usually that is your COA that comes from Microsoft and this will allow you to input this number into your system which will give you access then to your new operating system. The nice part about installing any new media is that it will prompt you and you'll walk through the steps all the way through until you've completed your upgrade. Any questions before I move on? Hey Sarah, this is Linda. I just wanted to interject here. So I was just typing it in chat but I might as well just say it. So if you obtain your licensing for Windows 7 or other Microsoft products through TechSoup, you can get your license keys through the Volume License Center. Your Microsoft Volume License Center will have those keys available for you. So somebody chatted a question about what if I don't have the disks or I can't find the disks. You can download the operating system through the Microsoft website to another computer and then make a disk out of it and then get your licensing from the Volume License Center to use with that downloaded copy. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Sorry. I was just chatting the same thing out too. Many companies now are making their software available for download as long as you have your license keys or your product keys. So you want to make sure you have that sticker if you were given a sticker or if you bought it on a physical disk and it came in a box and it's got a license. You want to make sure you've got that before you do this process. But you may still be able to just download it from online if you have that key. Perfect. Thank you. So we're almost done. There's only five steps. So step four, we've installed the new operating system. We're really excited. But now it's about moving back all of our files and settings and getting the system back up and ready so our admin can get back to work. If you ran the Windows Easy Transfer Tool, basically you'll run it again and you'll move all of your files and settings back to the computer. You'll want to do this before you reinstall the programs. Or of course you'll want to manually reinstall all of the files manually before you install your programs because your last and final step will be going through reinstalling all of the programs and updating your drivers. So as Linda said, your drivers obviously are those little pieces of software that connect your operating system with your actual PC in order to make sure that everything works smoothly. So once you're able to do all of those updates and reinstall all of your programs, your admin is then all ready to go. If you're having problems with drivers, we have a few websites here that you can go to and look for drivers or do some troubleshooting. Also there are some good forums that TechSoup hosts so if you've got some problems with some specific drivers, I'm sure that's a good place to go to for those resources. And then the last step which is optional is that you can do a post install cleanup. Basically what this does is it removes any settings and deletes any of the old Windows folders. It's something that can't be undone so usually you want to make sure that you have been using it for a couple of weeks in order to make sure that everything is working well. And here are the four quick steps that will outline you through that. If it's not something you want to do then that's fine too. It just clears up a little bit of more space on your drive. And all of this as I mentioned is that actually can be found in much, much greater detail on the Microsoft page. So I pulled out points from this first bullet point to walk you through this example today of upgrading to Windows 7 from a Windows VSR or XP machine. There's also instructions on how to upgrade to Windows 8.1. And so it is pretty easy to just search the site to be able to find which applies to your specific need. And then again here is the driver link. And then our last resource slide of course is Linda and myself. So here is our contact information. So if you have any questions feel free to contact us. And of course I want to thank you for your time today. Thank you both of you. I really appreciate your time sharing this information. So before we move into the full Q&A where we will answer more questions, I want to just go ahead and cover a little bit about where you can get upgrades if you don't already have them. So first I want to mention the Microsoft software donation program through TechSoup. And this is now open to religious organizations, churches, mosque temples, and faith-based nonprofits in addition to all other kinds of 501c3s. You can now access donated Windows 8. And there was somebody earlier asking if you can still get Windows 7 and you can. And the one thing that's really great about Microsoft's donation program is that they include software assurance which is a benefit that in retail environments and businesses they pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars for software assurance. And it comes free with all of the donated software through the Microsoft donation program with one exception that I'll talk about in a moment. And this allows you to upgrade for free if there are new releases of the same software within two years. Additionally, it allows you to downgrade. So if you went in and you tried installing and upgrading to Windows 8.1 and you realized after the fact, oh my gosh, some mission-critical software is not compatible and we didn't realize it before and we need to downgrade this machine to Windows 7, you can go into the Volume Licensing Service Center and access that operating system for no cost. So it's a great feature and benefit of the donation programs. And so you can see here just a picture of the Microsoft catalog operating systems. Now these are upgrades. So you can select the upgrade for 8.1, 32-bit, 64-bit, or Windows 7, 32-bit, 64-bit. And the admin fee is per license. So if you're looking to upgrade to machines, you'd be requesting two of these or five machines, five of these for example. So that's one option. Another option for those of you who may need, maybe you don't know where your licenses are, you don't have any history of who owns the licenses on your existing machines because you've had it for 12 years or 8 years or 5 years and you just have no history of it or maybe it was donated to you or a volunteer brought that machine in and you don't know who owns the license. Microsoft offers this program called Get Genuine. And this is available as a one request ever. I'm going to point to the language right here, one request ever in the life of your organization to get full operating systems to get your machines genuine. Maybe you bought computers at Best Buy and they have home versions of operating systems and you really want to upgrade to pro versions. This is the only way to do that, to get the full version donated to you for this $8 admin fee through the Microsoft Get Genuine program. But like I said, it's one time only ever. So if you've got two computers in your office that are functioning that you know you're going to want to upgrade and you don't have licenses and you have a couple in the closet and you think a volunteer is going to bring one in a month or two, then you need to be requesting five of those, not two because you will never have the chance to request it again through the Get Genuine program. And this is the exception as well that the Get Genuine donated licenses of full operating systems do not include software assurance. But once you're genuine, then if you want to upgrade to the newest version in a year or two years or whenever it might be, then you can come back to TechSoup and just access our regular upgrade donation program which would include software assurance. So it's a great feature, a great benefit that Microsoft donates to the community and civil sector to help people get on operating systems that are legitimate and that are not running home versions when you really need an enterprise or professional version. Now if you find that your hardware is really the problem and that that's the barrier to upgrading, that you have a machine that's 8 or 10 years old that really just doesn't meet those minimum specs and by far doesn't meet those recommended specs, then there is another option through TechSoup's donation programs and I mentioned earlier that Sarah's organization PCRR is one of our refurbishers that takes high-end factory or high-end business grade machines and factory refurbishes them to lovely like new condition that they make available through our donation programs. And this is just a shot of one of the pages. I won't go to our site to show it but you'll see that there's these two drop-downs. And you can drop-down to look at computers with hard disk drives, steady-state drives, laptops, tablets, and you can look at different tiers of donations whether it's a high tier, a mid-tier desktop, whether it's a laptop or a refurbished tablet, or even new tablets that are available in the program. So if you're needing hardware this is one opportunity, one place to look. And these primarily come installed with Windows 7 and Sarah corrects me if you guys are also doing Windows 8 machines. The new tablets, I believe most of those come with Windows 8 at this point or 8.1 but most of the refurbished computers I believe come pre-installed already with Windows 7 operating systems. And so again once you have those and you want to upgrade down the road you can come back and access the upgrade donations through our program. And I'll just show one other screen. They also come with Office as well. Thank you. So you're also saving by having Office pre-installed too which I failed to mention. And so this is just another screen just showing some mid-tier laptop computers. So there's a lot of different resources available through these donation programs. And like I mentioned the refurbished computer initiative primarily brings in refurbished hardware. A lot of it is business grade only used for a couple of years before it was cycled out through these huge companies that like General Motors or something that may go through 10,000 computers a year and just turns them out. They come into the programs through organizations like Sarah's and they refurbish them and put them back out into our hands to keep them out of landfills and to also provide them as lower cost high end business grade machines for your use. So I'd also like to mention if you are needing support on how to do some of this all of what Sarah and Linda covered we tried to keep it as straightforward as possible so that it wouldn't be a scary process because we know it can be sometimes. But if you really need somebody to help doing this Linda's organization Tech Impact has donation programs through TechSoup as well and they provide nonprofit help desk which she mentioned already. They do have a one hour consultation to help people with tech issues and tech needs that's available through TechSoup and you can always reach out to them directly to talk about support in doing this. You may also have local consultants and you can come to TechSoup's forums which we point people to our databases and software forum where we have experts on hand all the time moderating those forums that can help walk you through some of the questions that you may have that we may not answer today. We're going to go into questions right now but if you find that you have a question while you're in the middle of the process our forums might have somebody there that can help respond to it or you may be able to get a recommendation for a local consultant who can walk you through the process more directly. So with that I'm going to go ahead and open up for questions and we have already quite a few in the queue. So let's see, Sylvia asks, so there isn't a direct way to just transfer everything when you upgrade you actually need to reinstall all the programs. Is that correct Sarah since you covered that part? Yes it is. So you're installing a brand new operating system onto your computer so you're really starting from scratch. So you have to have the mindset of there's nothing left on that system. And so it was like you were getting a brand new computer. Great. And we also had a question asking, Irene asks, what if you don't have admin access to the computer because it was donated? Can you still upgrade the operating system or are you really stuck? Hi, this is Linda. I'll answer that. So you can upgrade the operating system if you don't have admin rights to the workstation, but you won't be able to do all of those things that Sarah told you to do prior to the upgrade like backing up the files and that kind of thing. So if it's a donated computer and you don't care that everything on that computer is going to go away when you do the upgrade, you can go ahead and just start with the CD, get the license keys, and start from there and go ahead and upgrade that computer. There are ways to get into that computer that my team knows about and we don't necessarily want to tell you about. But anyway, it can be done. The dangerous way to break the machine you mean? I'm sure you guys don't but if I tried it I probably would. Here's a question for you also Linda while you're still on the line. And I already know your opinion on this which is why I'm asking you for the answer. So Denise asks, how do we determine what server our league would need? We currently do not have a server but we need one. What do you think about that? So I'm interested to know what you think that I think I would say about that. But this is what I'm going to say about that. In today's world Tech Impact's stand on this is don't buy a server. There are plenty of cloud solutions that are available that can probably take every single one of your business needs and put it into the cloud so that you do not have to purchase, own, operate, support, and worry about a server. Is that what you thought I was going to say? That is exactly what I thought you were going to say. I know the Tech Impact mindset on this. And TechSoup I think is pretty on board with agreeing with that that especially if you're a smaller organization having an onsite server is just a lot more time and energy. And it's a big security risk that you have a flood in your office and you don't have a good suitable set of backups going when you lose everything. So really there are some concerns of security in the cloud but there are also a lot of safeguards that are there that can make your data and your information much more secure than they may be in an onsite server. So we concur with that opinion of Tech Impact, at least I do. And I can also include a link in the follow-up in case you're interested in learning more about the Office 365 donations that allows you to have not just file and data storage in the cloud but pretty much everything, your email hosted, your communication system, and more all hosted in the cloud. And that's donated to nonprofits as well. So let's see, we have some other questions here. Irene asks, how do you complete a reformat to erase everything on a hard drive? So maybe you got a donated computer and you need to completely wipe it. Do you have recommendations for doing that? That's either of you. This is Linda again. There's a free program that you can use that's called D-Ban. That's D is in Dave and B is in Boy, A is in Alpha, and is in Nancy, that you can run on a computer. So if you are trying to remove computers from your organization and either donate them or recycle them, you would want to run a program like D-Ban on the hard disk before you let them leave your office. D-Ban is a federally recognized hard drive wiping thing. I don't know, Sarah, do you have other programs that you guys use besides D-Ban? There are a number of them that you can use. Usually what you'll want to do is make sure that if you are trying to truly get rid of your equipment that you are working with, a recycler that is R2 certified, they will then have a digital data destruction process that is compliant with the government's NIST 888 standard for data destruction. So if you want to do it yourself, D-Ban is a good option, but you still want to make sure that you are working with somebody who follows both the R2 standard, is R2 certified, and then follows the NIST standard as well. I would like to just add to that, Becky, you might want to speak to this. When you get a volume license key from Microsoft, those keys that you get are for your organization. It is against the licensing rules for you to donate that computer with the operating system on it to anyone outside of your organization because the operating system when you are using volume licensing does not belong to the computer, it belongs to the organization. So if you purchase, if you go through TechSoup and get 25 donated licenses of Microsoft Windows or whatever it is, you can put that on up to 25 machines in your office, but you can't let one of those machines go to another organization or individual. You must wipe that operating system off, and that is kind of like part of that, get genuine stuff too. Right, it does help keep the licenses legal. Now one thing to mention though for people who work at home and at the office for their organization is part of software assurance they have a home use program where I think it is a $10 fee that allows you to extend that license from your work computer to your home computer. And at the same time you are expected that if you leave the organization to uninstall that. But the home use program makes a lot of software assurance benefits available to you to extend to your home the same license that you have on your work computer. So again, a great benefit that too few people take advantage of I think because they just don't know what it means. So Sylvia is asking, how do you get volume license keys? And so when you go through the process if you request donations through TechSoup you will get an email from TechSoup that says, thank you for your request. It is being processed. And then you will get an email from Microsoft that says your request has been fulfilled. Here is a link to the Volume Licensing Service Center and you create an account there if you don't already have one. Log yourself in. And right in there you will have a list of all of the donated products that are available that you have requested and that have been fulfilled. And the license keys will be right there on the page. And you can also look around for software assurance benefits. And you can look at training materials. There is a lot in that Volume Licensing Service Center that is available. And that is something that is run by Microsoft not by TechSoup. But both of the emails that you get after you make a donation request and after it is fulfilled we will have links to take you there so that you can access that information. Let's see what else. We have just got a moment left so I fear I have to wrap up. We did have a couple of questions about netbooks. And so really quickly either you have an opinion on netbooks, Bill asks, five-year-old netbook that came preloaded with XP, can it be upgraded to today's environment? I know netbooks are usually pretty tiny so what do you think? I'm going to say probably not. Yeah, I'm going to say probably not. But it's just, you know, netbooks are hard to upgrade so depending on what the specs of them, what the specs are it's going to be unlikely that a netbook would be able to be upgraded. But you certainly could try. With that I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up since we are at the top of the hour. I'm sorry we didn't get to every question but I hope we answered many of them. Go ahead and chat into us to let us know one thing that you learned today that you are going to try and implement or do or plan for or inventory so that you can help improve your own organization's technology. And please go ahead and share this information with other nonprofits that you work with that could benefit from it as well. Lastly I'd like to invite you to join us for upcoming webinars. Next Thursday we will be doing a webinar on how not to choose a donor database. So if you are looking for a new one or thinking you do go ahead and join us for that. Immediately following that we will have a soup chat in our online forums where you can come and ask questions about how to collaborate online using Box's online cloud services. We will have the CEO of Box.org joining us for that. On April 2 we will be talking about online fundraising strategies specifically related to giving day campaigns like Giving Tuesday or Give Local America or many others that happen throughout the year. Then we will be having a webinar on April 9 on the brand idea, the secret to managing your values based brand. You can also explore our webinar archives for more. Please join us and connect with us at TechSoupGlobal.org, on TechSoup.org, on our Facebook and our Twitter. I know some of you joined us from Canada so please check out TechSoup Canada's resources if you are from that part of the world because they have donation programs that can help fulfill many of the things we talked about today as well. Thank you so much Sarah and Linda for sharing your expertise. We really appreciate it. And thank you to all of our participants and to Allie for helping on the back end. Lastly, thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for providing the use of this platform to make it possible for us to present these webinars to you on a weekly basis. We are using their ReadyTalk 500 tool which is also available in TechSoup's catalog. You can see the link there if you want more information about ReadyTalk. When you close out of this window please complete the post-event survey to help us continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you everyone and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.