Windows 10 support is less than a year away – hundreds of millions of PCs will remain without updates

In less than a year, on October 14, 2025, Microsoft will stop providing security updates for most PCs still running Windows 10. Organizations and individuals will be able to pay for updates for another three years, but the cost of this service is still unknown — Microsoft promised to announce it “closer to October 2025.”

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Typically, dropping support for older OSes isn’t a big deal: the company finally stopped supporting Windows 7 and Windows 8 in January 2023, and the world didn’t end, although some PCs continue to run those legacy OSes. But there remain three points that make the Windows 10 situation different.

Firstly, there is a record short period of time between the release of a new OS version and the end of support for the old one. Windows 8 was replaced by Windows 10 at the end of 2015, and its support ended in January 2023; a replacement for Windows 7 came out in late 2012, and mainstream support ended in January 2020 (but continued to release additional paid updates). That is, between the release of a replacement and the end of support in both cases, a little more than seven years passed – in the case of Windows 10, only four years passed.

Secondly, this is a record-breaking large base of users who actively continue to work with the retiring platform. Windows 10 still runs on two-thirds of all active Windows systems worldwide, up from about one-third for Windows 11, according to StatCounter data as of September 2024. In January 2022, Windows 8 accounted for only 3% of Windows PCs; and in January 2019, 35% of active Windows PCs were running Windows 7, so Microsoft offered expanded support. Over the next year, Windows 11 will close this gap, but it is by no means impossible that Windows 10 will remain the most used version of Windows at the time of end of support.

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Third, many Windows 10 PCs cannot officially upgrade to Windows 11 because they do not meet the system requirements. The slow rollout of Windows 11 is compounded by the fact that PCs manufactured before around 2018 (and sometimes later) are not supported on the new platform without workarounds. The case is unprecedented: older versions of Windows from version 3.1 to Vista were limited by such easy-to-understand criteria as speed and hardware capabilities, and the rationale for upgrading a PC every two or three years was more obvious. Now hardware replacement cycles have become longer, and technically nothing prevented installing Windows 10 on any PC from the Windows Vista era or later – it all came down to the cost of the license and the patience of the user with the old PC. Windows 11 system requirements have left a surprising number of perfectly functioning PCs behind, for sometimes vaguely stated security reasons.

Given all these factors, something that has never happened before in the Windows ecosystem may soon happen: the majority or a significant portion of active Internet-connected PCs will suddenly no longer receive security updates, and the easiest ways to avoid this will be to switch to paid support, buy a new PC, or radical change of OS. Those willing to take the path of least resistance will likely need to upgrade to Windows 11 using workarounds to continue using the same PC and software as they do today. Otherwise, you will have to prepare to switch to one of the popular Linux distributions or ChromeOS Flex.