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Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026
- bell-cot 1y agoAs the article's title notes, with strings attached.
- _mlbt 1y agoWindows 10 came out almost 10 years ago and they offered a free upgrade to Windows 11. I know people love to hate on Microsoft, but they’ve done better than most technology companies when it comes to security updates here. You’re lucky to get even half of that length of support from most Android devices for example.
- bezier-curve 1y agoIf we're comparing them to other software companies, what would be their fairest comparison? Is there another company that manages the overwhelming majority of client desktops around the world?
- adastra22 1y agoApple? Certainly in education and other sectors. Their support horizons are t as long.
- charcircuit 1y agoGoogle with over 50% mobile os market share and they support each Android version for 3 years.
- hnhg 1y agoI have a perfectly good machine that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 for some arbitrary reason. Fortunately, I no longer specifically need Windows and can move on from it. I actually quite like Windows now that WSL2 is decent, but I don't need this specific form of enshittification in my life (along with all the tracking and ads). I don't use Android for the very same reason.
- derivagral 1y agoThat free upgrade refuses to work with my hardware. I am glad they are continuing security, but they are literally forcing me to install another OS (as I understand the security difference).
- spencerflem 1y agoEven if I wanted to, my CPU isn't supported for (IMO) completely nonsense reasons.
- gpm 1y agoWindows 10 was marketed with the promise of being the "last version of windows" by microsoft employees. Personally I think they should be held to that promise, at least in so far as supporting it as long as they still support any other version of windows. The upgrade to windows 11 is not free in so far as it doesn't support the hardware that people have.
- octo888 1y ago> Windows 10 was marketed with the promise of being the "last version of windows" by microsoft employees It was just that - marketing! To get a load of people to migrate to it, right? "Do it guys, it's the last one you'll need to do, we promise" Trust Microsoft? Not even once
- cjbgkagh 1y agoMicrosoft made the announcement through very trusted Microsoft media experts which they have since burned. I remember their emphatic assurances at the time but didn’t believe them.
- vel0city 1y agoThey made the announcement from one guy saying it once when giving a talk on developing LiveTiles.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI previously worked at MS so asked friends about it and they agreed that there was an attempt to foster the impression of windows as a SAAS both internally and externally. If that impression gets out and is not countered then it’s a tacit acceptance. MS burns people all the time so we figured it would be another example of that. Just this time it’s more regular people and not just devs and partners. Some people internally and externally legitimately believed that people would pay $100 p.a. to use windows. Had that worked they might have kept the subscription model going. Office 365 is an example of that model working. It was also part of the billion devices push to make the case for the Microsoft App Store which we knew was in trouble, it seemed like a deliberate attempt to sacrifice long term trust for a short term gain.
- eviks 1y agoOn the other hand, there is no reason you have to calibrate your principles to some random metric of "most"
- sedatk 1y agoWin11 doesn’t support all hardware Win10 runs on. Free upgrade is meaningless in that sense.
- GeekyBear 1y ago> I know people love to hate on Microsoft People rag on a company that is trying to force you to use an online account to log onto your local PC? Doesn't using Windows Backup to qualify for these extended Windows 10 security updates require that you purchase more than the default amount of cloud storage too?
- hhh 1y agothey don’t force you to use an online account
- ManlyBread 1y agoThey make it close to impossible to install windows without making an account, you either need to mess around in the registry or run some weird Powershell commands in order to skip the account creation step. They do this because they know a non-technical person will just create an account instead. It's fucking bullshit and it is 100% intentional.
- Wistar 1y agoActually, I discovered that, as long as the machine has a TPM and it is turned on, I can just set it (Win 11) up initially with a throwaway MS account. Then, I add local admin and user accounts and, using the admin account, I delete the MS account. I have done it many times now. It’s easier than all of the other crap trying to avoid that MS account.
- hhh 1y agothis is not true, you can just create a local account with Windows 11 Pro and not use the online stuff at all.
- hollandheese 1y agoNo, you can't. Not with any of the Consumer versions. You have to do the workarounds to not have your initial account be an online account.
- justin66 1y ago> they offered a free upgrade to Windows 11 I wish. I have a completely capable machine that won't accept the upgrade, due to some completely artificial requirements MSFT built in.
- zanderwohl 1y ago> a free upgrade to Windows 11 My very expensive tower PC can't "up"grade because it doesn't have a TPM 2.0 module. So unless Microsoft plans to give me a new CPU (and new mobo) it's not free for many users.
- anticensor 1y agoTPM requirement can be bypassed with a registry edit, however this does not lift the requirements of the user apps that rely on TPM functions (such as Adobe CC or certain game anticheats).
- arp242 1y agoI don't really blame Microsoft for stopping updates. That's fine. But they're also preventing anyone else from doing any updates. And no one said the situation with Android devices is great.
- mystified5016 1y agoIt's not a free upgrade if you have no choice
- timewizard 1y ago"support" In other words continue to supply the proprietary software that runs on my hardware. How about, if you can't or won't "support" your product anymore, you are required to give away the source code. We should be done holding users hostage.
- QuantumGood 1y agoThis was expected, though last minute.
- paulkrush 1y agoMicrosoft announced that you can extend Windows 10 support if you enroll in Microsoft Backup or purchase “Microsoft Points.” Just think if they get printer manufacturers in on this, just to keep your ink cartridges “authentic” and up to date, and you can keep using Windows 10. And so on... It’s interesting/unsettling to extrapolate a dystopian future from these moves. Keiichi Matsuda’s short film “Hyper-Reality”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
- goosedragons 1y agoYou don't purchase Microsoft points. You can purchase extra support with 1000 Microsoft points that you can easily get for free in like a week clicking on some links on Bing.
- mystified5016 1y agoThat's paying for them with your time. You'd be better off spending that time earning money for yourself instead of Microsoft's ad network
- goosedragons 1y agoIt's literally like 5 min a day. Not even. They just cap how many points you can earn in a day.
- discostrings 1y agoFor many, and hopefully increasingly more and more of us, time and attention can be more valuable than money. Manipulating our behavior to develop familiarity with a product by seeding the habit of using it as an ad-clicking serf and nurturing that habit by drawing it out across a series of days as the means of acquiring security for our tools and information is a coercive and corrosive exchange. It's designed to seem like such a small thing that it's benign, as if attention is worth infinitely less than money. By changing us, forming new and often bad habits, and extracting ongoing attention interest payments without us noticing, the cost can end up being far greater.
- mouse_ 1y agoI wish I could still use 7
- OrvalWintermute 1y agoI think 7 is when Windows hit its peak. Much of the recent additions have been more about user information and chaining to cloud, than they have been solid improvements.
- anton-c 1y agoObviously couldn't be used in most commercial spaces but would it really be that harmful to run at home? I'm not that knowledgeable about computer security. Just don't know why a hacker would target a random home user, if that's even the fear.
- fsflover 1y ago> Just don't know why a hacker would target a random home user For example, in order to to create a botnet.
- mouse_ 1y agoIt's not harmful at all, as long as you connect through a normal router, which will have a rudimentary firewall enabled. That's all you need, really. Other than that it's just the normal understanding that you shouldn't run virus.exe or virus.pdf.exe, and if you do, you'll have less protection versus on Windows 10/11.
- tester756 1y agoOutdated browser exploits?
- __turbobrew__ 1y agoWindows 7 was basically complete for my use cases.
- KronisLV 1y agoI have to say that after switching to Windows 11, I don't hate it as much as I thought I would. I'm still a bit upset that they took away vertical taskbars from us, but some things like multi-GPU support is better than in Windows 10: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/what-is-ruining-dual-gpu-setups https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/what-is-ruining-dual-gpu-setups On the other hand, for whatever reason Windows 11 right now refuses to install updates (I think the logs complained about their own web view components being unavailable last I checked, which is wrong because they definitely are there), which is kind of embarrassing. With news of many games also performing better on Linux distros nowadays like https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-steamos-than-windows-11-ars-testing-finds/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/06/games-run-faster-on-s... it feels like vendor lock (certain anti-cheat and software not running on anything else) and familiarity is increasingly what's keeping folks on the platform. While I've also seen my friends struggling to get an Arch install just right, it's nice to know that if I'm willing to say goodbye to some games (e.g. looking at https://www.protondb.com https://www.protondb.com) and software (I actually like the Windows version of SourceTree and tools like WinSCP and MobaXTerm and even Notepad++), then I could go back to using Linux Mint with Cinnamon as my daily driver again - pretty pleasant setup.
- throwawaystress 1y agoI’m so glad you mentioned the vertical taskbars being taken away. There’s a feedback item on Microsoft’s forums that’s years old now and they still haven’t addressed it. It seems so weird that they took away this functionality that they’d had implemented for years, seemingly for no reason.
- princevegeta89 1y agoNot sure man, I just want a version of Microsoft Windows without all the telemetry and the ads and the aggressive control Microsoft has on the system via updates. Time and again they keep changing the default browser, throwing ads into Start Menu, blocking specific applications (such as Chrome etc. Bad example because Chrome is an evil junkyard. Imagine them blocking Google Drive one day because they want you to use OneDrive). In general WSL is great but the entire Windows system feels so outdated and full of duplicate layers thrown upon each other with modern UIs on top of old APIs with the old UIs not even deleted and taken care of. The productivity and cleanliness of OS X keeps convincing me again and again to stick to the Macs as a platform - in my POV this is one of the few things Apple has gotten right (with Apple CPUs), after decades.
- eviks 1y ago> Microsoft's efforts do seem to be paying off (or, at least, some combination of Microsoft's efforts and Windows 10 PCs naturally aging out of the install base). While Windows 10 is still running on the majority of Windows PCs worldwide (about 53 percent, according to Statcounter's May 2025 data) 53% is huge mere months away from the end, and actually means that the efforts have resoundingly failed.
- NegativeK 1y agoIf your org has a fiscal year that begins in the middle of the calendar year (July 1), there might not have been the budget to do the upgrade until months away. Compounded with general upgrade procrastination...
- makeitdouble 1y agoYou might be seeing it in the same lens as macos for instance, but windows' model is fundamentaly different and that deadline is only for specific cases (that's why they can play the "sign up for backup and we'll expand your time" game) For instance Enterprise LTSC version of Windows 10 is officially supported until 2031. A ton of the devices inside these 53% have no need to move away from win 10 in any urgent way.
- eviks 1y agoI'm seeing it in the lens of the stated goal mentioned in the article "Microsoft is still sticking to its guns in promoting Windows 11 upgrades"
- makeitdouble 1y agoThanks. To that point, they still have years to reach that goal, we'll see in a decade if they utterly failed.
- coolspot 1y agoI am running Enterprise LTSC version of Windows 10 in a VM for .NET development and it started to show full-screen popups saying that “it’s time to upgrade” to win11 with some text suggesting that it is urgent and time is running out.
- internet2000 1y agoIt’s silly games like this that justify piracy. If I can get the extended support in 2 minutes by changing the edition and reactivating OR by doing an hour worth of Bing searches with Adblock on to accumulate the points, what’s the difference to them? It’s all fake.
- npteljes 1y agoThey don't give a fuck, at least people are still running Windows.
- herf 1y agoThe backup requirement shows a lot of self-awareness from Microsoft, but it's still too hard to migrate a Windows machine. Contrast with a new Mac, I wait a few hours, and all my stuff is identically copied over via the built-in tools, and it feels like the same machine. With Windows, preferences all over just don't really copy. I don't care about a few .docx files, I want hundreds of legacy apps and settings to be preserved. As it is, it's more than a week of work when you get a new PC.
- sedatk 1y agoToo late, already switched to Fedora on my old machines because Win11 didn’t support them.
- corysama 1y agoI'd be happy to upgrade to 11 if they would let me. I'm running 10 on a powerful, expensive PC that 11 won't accept.
- thombles 1y agoUse rufus.ie to burn a USB that has the hardware restrictions removed. Works a treat IME.
- anonymars 1y agoFor now
- wesnerm2 1y agoUpgrading to Windows 11 is possible from an unsupported Windows 10 machine by adjusting a registry setting and downloading an ISO from Microsoft.
- Wistar 1y agoDid you check your BIOS settings to see if you can turn on the TPM? Worked for me on several circa 2018 custom built machines. The builder, Puget Systems, shipped the machines with the TPM turned off. With the TPM turned on, Win 11 installed without undue drama.
- pipes 1y agoThis is good advice, I discovered two of my PCs had tpms just disabled at bios level. Though in the end I've got so annoyed with the advertising I've moved one of them to Linux and the other will ditch windows too, eventually.
- corysama 1y agoYou were right. A little googling for my bios name and TPM turned up the magic switches I needed to flip to make Windows 11 happy.
- EvanAnderson 1y ago
- thanhhaimai 1y agoThe only reason for me to ever boot into Windows is for gaming. As more and more games support SteamOS, it's increasingly tempting to just drop Windows altogether.
- idatum 1y agoDang, I was almost motivated to figure out how to get Debian working on my old i5 Surface Laptop 1. No way I'm tossing it since it works fine (even battery is decent still). But no way I'm spending time with Linux if Win10 will still get updates. If I will really need another Windows device though, I'll just buy a cheap N100 device.
- mzajc 1y ago> Microsoft will also extend a year of additional Windows 10 security updates to any users who opt into Windows Backup, a relatively recent Windows 10 and Windows 11 app that backs up some settings and files using a Microsoft account. Users can also opt into ESU updates by spending 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, which are handed out for everything from making purchases with your Microsoft account to doing Bing searches. Sometimes I wonder how far they'd have to go before people stopped putting up with their bullshit. This reads like something out of The Onion.
- shaggie76 1y agoMy Windows 7 laptop still seems to want security updates about once a week; maybe it's just Windows Defender and not kernel bugs but I find it interesting that MS still bothers.
- jakub_g 1y agoI bought my parents a Dell laptop in 2019/2020. It has 7th gen i3 so just below the Windows 11 threshold. The machine is in perfect shape as it's used a few times per month max for watching YouTube or some online banking, or occasional LibreOffice usage. I don't want to generate electronic waste, what would you recommend? Installing Linux Mint? Note: I'm far from my parents so can't do IT support. Edit: also occasional HP scanner/printer usage.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoInstall Win 11 anyway. Bypass instructions are on YouTube, Reddit, Github, tech blogs, etc.
- blibble 1y agoodds are they'll push out an update that requires a CPU feature not present on that CPU then GP parents' machine will just bluescreen at boot with illegal instruction
- fibonacci112358 1y agoThey won't, Windows isn't even compiled with AVX2 extensions on, even though every CPU in the last 10y+ supports it, for the fear of it running on some machine that doesn't have AVX2. The whole "CPU unsupported" thing is from the marketing side, trying to push purchase of new hardware, not from the actual devs.
- p_ing 1y agoNo, it’s not marketing. A big security feature is VBS which isn’t supported on older CPUs.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoCompletely baseless assumption. Who told you that?
- s_ting765 1y ago
- ck2 1y ago2032 if you go LTSC
- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- roskelld 1y agoYou can run a script to scoop up the search points for desktop and mobile to skip the monkey work of collecting points. It won't get the extra points for doing other reward tasks. https://github.com/jack-mil/bing-rewards https://github.com/jack-mil/bing-rewards
- johnklos 1y agoThe title is wrong. It's not free - you need to give them your data, in the most literal way possible, or you need to otherwise use magic "company points" that you earn by giving up your privacy. That's not free.
- npteljes 1y agoWin 11 is a bloated piece of shit, so I'm not surprised people are hesitant to adopt. Besides, it has nothing to offer over Win 10. Win 10 worked just fine, so why bother with the upgrade? People are also no strangers to running outdated hardware. At least 31% of the active Android users are running an EOL version of it. https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobile-tablet/worldwide/#monthly-202505-202506-bar https://gs.statcounter.com/android-version-market-share/mobi... My gaming Windows 10 LTSC will stop get support at January 12, 2027. I will probably hold out until then, and see what the landscape is then.