Notice regarding upcoming Microsoft Windows and Office upgrades

As part of our initiative to ensure all computers are up-to-date and secure across campus, ASU Computing Services will be making several upgrades to all Windows computers across campus in the next few weeks.  

As Microsoft support of Windows 10 build 1709 ends in April 2020 (that means they will no longer be creating security patches for it), we are upgrading our Windows computers to Windows 10 build 1909.  This is an in-place upgrade, and will not affect your data. We will be pushing this upgrade out as a required patch the evening of Friday, March 13th. We will be working on campus that weekend and throughout Spring Break to get as many computers completed as possible.  The mandatory push will only install during our evening maintenance windows (after 9 PM). If you want to start the upgrade yourself during the day, we will also be making the upgrade available in the Software Center, which you can access by clicking on the Start button and starting to type “Software Center” then clicking on the Software Center when it pops up in the Start Menu.  Once you are in the Software Center, in the left column, click on Operating Systems, and you should see an available upgrade. You can choose to kick off this installation yourself, but it will take several hours, and your computer will be unusable during the upgrade. A quick way to tell if your computer has been upgraded, when you press CTRL+ALT+DEL to login, the background should blur.  If this happens, you are upgraded!

Also coming up is the deployment of Microsoft Office 2019.  This will be made available through the software center March 16-18 so you can kick-off the installation yourself, this will also take a couple of hours as Office is a pretty big software package. For those that do not choose to do the install themselves, it will be pushed as a mandatory update on March 19 and will install only during evening maintenance windows.

NOTE:  These updates will only happen if your computer is on campus. If you are an off-campus employee, we will need to coordinate with you to get your computer updated.  

If you have questions or problems with either of these upgrades, please contact the ASU Computing Services Help Desk at Ext. 7741 or 719-587-7741.

Thank you,

Computing Services