Microsoft issues deadline for end of Windows 10 support – it's pay to play for security Microsoft on Tuesday warned that full security support for Windows 10 will end on October 14, 2025, but offered a lifeline for customers unable or unwilling to upgrade two years hence. "While we strongly recommend moving to Windows 11, we understand there are circumstances that could prevent you from replacing Windows 10 …
Moved up to Linux. Now I run “ghost spectre” win10 in virt-manager sandbox (no internet — antivirus no longer needed, nor are ‘updates’ since it’s just for legacy software anyway).
The nice thing is that vm “snapshots” actually work, unlike microsoft garbage “restore points” that always failed. Plus I became offended by microsoft snooping, stealing personal data, and unwanted advertising. That all ended just a few months ago, I did not realize how anxiety inducing that “experience” was — until I fired microsoft.
Yea, like the Windows 11 upgrade program doesn't work, and doesn't generate proper error logs.
<rant>I've upgraded a boatload of machines (& VM's) from Windows 10 to 11, and Microsoft has done an absolutely shit job handling the situations where it does not work perfectly.
One of my systems, a 2 year old Origin PC AMD Ryzen 9 3950X system (TPM 2 chip, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 8GB graphics, 4TB Western Digital Black SN850X SSD) with fully updated Windows 10 Pro , modern up-to-date bios, etc) as of last week still goes through the entire Windows upgrade, gets through a couple of boots, and then reverts back to Windows 10 Pro. The various setupact.log files (& setuperr.log, miglog.xml, BlueBox.log...) show nothing about the revert or why. Yet I have a couple of Win 11 instances installed & working in Virtual Box VM's on the same machine.
And I know a bunch of other folks with similar upgrade failures on modern machines that Microsoft's "PC Health Check" is happy as a clam to pronounce "This PC meets Windows 11 Requirements". If Microsoft wants people to upgrade, they need to supply an upgrader that actually works & logs the fail trigger cause if the upgrade reverts. And if the issue is a driver incompatibility, should not require digging through the upgrader log files to ID it.
The lowest hanging fruit for improvement would be for PC Health Check itself to scan for Windows 11 incompatible drivers so they can be dealt with BEFORE the upgrade attempt. (And Microsoft, a friendly user interface hint: Scanning isn't enough - you should tell the user the specific problematic driver files, not just generate a typical Microsoft-like vague message of "You have incompatible drivers.") </rant>
At work we have a couple of machines where I work that still run Windows 7. Why? They were bought to control other machinery using specially written software that only works on Windows 7. The supplier can provide a Windows 10 compatible version, but we would need to upgrade the machines the computers are controlling, and this would cost north of £100k.
The simpler, and considerably cheaper, solution is remove the machines from the network, which we have done. If they fail, we will have to deal with it then.
I have some PC's, isolated from the network of course, running dedicated machinery that have NT 4.0 on them. When one PC died a couple of years ago, we went to these guys who build new "legacy" PC's so we could keep going. Spending a few $k to keep something going that would cost north of $500k to replace makes total sense. https://nixsys.com/#
At work we have a couple of machines where I work that still run Windows 7
Previous Orkplace we had a cupboard full of old Compaq 386 desktops. One of our older machines had a custom-made control card (ISA bus) that would lock up solid if you put it in anything faster. The person who had designed the card had long since left (and taken the design docs with him) and we only had two of the cards (both much-repaired) so we didn't want to send one away for analysis and redesigning in case the live one failed (which they were prone to do at random intervals) and we had to put in the spare while the other one was fixed.
Every so often, we'd take some out, give them a good clean, boot them up to make sure they were working, fix any dodgy solder joints (which is where they usually failed) and put them back in the cupboard.
Upgrades not working has been an MS thing long before Win 10.
Of the thousands of PCs I've had to re-image in my career, (yes, thousands probably a few 10s of thousands) there was always a certain percentage that had to be re-imaged twice often 3 times before they worked.
I stopped doing regular upgrades years ago as they NEVER worked right. Since, I dunno, Win 95.
None of the platitudes in the article will stop millions of perfectly usable PC's from being consigned to Landfill (or recycling centre) when full support for W10 ends.
Intel and AMD plus the likes of Dell and hp will be rubbing their hands with glee.
If you can ditch MS then start planning for that day right now.
I mostly run Linux (and have done for decades), but still have a laptop (BIOS date 2010) that came with Windows. It's my only MS computer and I keep it for very occasional use, usually flashing firmware over USB. At least for that use I won't be too concerned about security updates.
I haven't bought a new desktop in ages. When setting up the kids with a Win box for school software I head to ebay, find some old enterprise warhorse coming off lease and grab what i want for $100. They usually last for quiet a while, and when they start getting a little long in the tooth you can either upgrade parts (SSD) or just swap them out. Hardware has been miles ahead of what I need for decades.
Nehalem Corei7 system I built in 2010, here, only slightly overclocked. I've upgraded video cards a few times, ram, and NVME drive added to PCI-E slot with adapter etc. but it's still the same motherboard and CPU. I use Linux and compile everything where performance is significant, with CPU specific optimizations and WITHOUT hardening flags/fortifications/stack canaries etc. that distributors do, and my kernels have those CPU crippling mitigations disabled. I play AAA games at 1920x1080 just fine (and there's amazingly little overhead in API translation for Windows games these days)
There's no reason to keep upgrading hardware anymore. It's not like the 90's where performance and capacity doubles every year.
I'm procrastinating a new build, got to start at least ordering parts soon before prices go up again. The only reason I'm driven to it is because I'm running into AVX instructions (unsupported) often accidental leakage caused by toolchains and they'll fix it, but also on purpose sometimes (with no execution check and alternate code paths) and the game will be unusable for me.
I had a 10 year old i3 laptop running Windows 10 which with only 4GB was so slow it was only fit for the skip now, never mind the Windows 11 upgrade which it could never run.
I quick install of Linux Mint, and it's perfectly adequate for web browsing and watching videos.
There really is no reason for the junking of hundreds of millions of PCs, just because of the whims of Microsoft.
Exactly this. And no-one even questions why a desktop operating system is so overwhelmingly bloated with so much additional, useless crap rammed into it whilst missing things that are actually useful. We just accept it, upgrade our machine as necessary, install and move on. I haven't missed using Windows on my home machines now for well over seven years.
Exactly this. And no-one even questions why a desktop operating system is so overwhelmingly bloated with so much additional, useless crap rammed into it whilst missing things that are actually useful. We just accept it, upgrade our machine as necessary, install and move on. I haven't missed using Windows on my home machines now for well over seven years.
The Win11 controversy has little to do with bloat, it's about the minimum hardware requirements. There's a reasonable rationale for most of those minimum requirements and junking backward compatibility. The CPU threshold seems to be around memory security controls that could be enabled on older machines, but would incur a significant performance penalty, and I can see why MS wouldn't go down that route. It is possible to load WIn 11 on just about any machine by circumventing the hardware checks, albeit missing out on some of the specific security improvements, if people want to do that MS have not stopped them. Likewise, if users want to use Win 10 they're free too do so with either paid extended support, using it without support, and perhaps using some third party tools to improve security.
Unfortunately, the forward march of technology waits for no one, and expecting MS to continue to support old hardware forever is plain daft. Whilst I've no love for MS, and dislike the botched interfaces of all Windows versions since Win 8, I can't say I have any sympathy with those moaning about Microsoft's policies. For anyone who doesn't like it, go Apple or Linux, or build your own OS from scratch, but regulators really should ignore the demands from some quarters to force a private company to support older, less reliable, less secure setups for those who want to eke a few more years out of dated hardware.
Anybody concerned about the environmental impact has options that don't involve scrapping their hardware, if they decide to do so then they simply need to ensure it goes to into a reputable recycling route.
RE: "significant performance penalty
I've found a hacked version of Windows 11 starts and runs much faster than 10 on my "ancient" Core i5-4570 with 8Gb RAM and an SSD. It uses under 2Gb at idle after startup, compared to over 3Gb for 10.
and if "memory security controls" are such an issue - why isn't the Linux installer being picky about my hardware?
This. Microsoft has always supported technical debt, and it harms everyone ultimately. It means that cruft stays in OS and apps, it hampers development and it slows progress and improvements to security and reliability. Historically the thing that killed old PCs is that the new OS just runs slow/badly on it and I can see why a line in the sand needs to be drawn by MS at some point. This dependency on hardware support for security features is relatively new in that it's a binary yes or no for W11. It's going to annoy a lot of people, but what's the alternative? Allow customers to run old OSs forever or force people into the current? I think if I were controlling it i'd allow consumers ESUs for free/low charge for a period of time, which is probably what they'll do.
I would say the main reason for the technical debt and cruft is that MS is not sure what can be removed without issues down the line. They have had several chances to do the decent thing and start from fresh to create a cleaner Windows (reminds me I must pay the window cleaner) but the risk is that the cashcow of users blindly accepting each new Windows as a better 'must install' option may look around and see other options which are cheaper/more reliable/shinier. The previous attempts have all caused more PR issues than tech issues (MS have developed a habit of multiple updates finally getting the OS >95% right and then throwing it away in favour of the next whalesong) but most of your old software continues to work no worse than it did before.
If people do switch OS supplier then the challenges can actually be less than those suffered when MS bring out a new version of Office where everything is in a new place and your old files are only mostly compatible but risk is one of those four letter words that most business will not entertain
> but what's the alternative?
Relabel Windows 10 as Windows 11 “possible less secure” which doesn’t have the TPM 2 mandatory requirement.
> i'd allow consumers ESUs for free/low charge for a period of time
£20 for five years of feature updates and 10 years of security updates? Ie. The price of a Windows 11 Pro MAR licence.
> This dependency on hardware support for security features is relatively new
Expect with all the AI rubbish being included in MS products now, for Windows 12 to require AI coprocessor…
"There's a reasonable rationale for most of those minimum requirements and junking backward compatibility. The CPU threshold seems to be around memory security controls that could be enabled on older machines, but would incur a significant performance penalty, and I can see why MS wouldn't go down that route. It is possible to load WIn 11 on just about any machine by circumventing the hardware checks, albeit missing out on some of the specific security improvements, if people want to do that MS have not stopped them. "
All true, but there are plenty of not very old machines that were supported all througout pre-release, yet disappeared from the release version. My private laptop is among them and whilst I have no wish to "upgrade" to Windows 11, that increasingly becomes a problem as Windows 10 EOL draws near. Even if I can and will apply the workarounds to be able to install Windows 11, it remains at Microsoft's whim to allow those workarounds to be in place. That's not a good place to be, and should have been avoided.
"It is possible to load WIn 11 on just about any machine by circumventing the hardware checks, albeit missing out on some of the specific security improvements, if people want to do that MS have not stopped them. "
Sort of. Assuming you haven't modified the installer, it won't install as an upgrade if the hardware requirements aren't met - only a clean install will work and even then it won't install the annual feature updates (clean install required again).
And there is a lower hard floor - if the machine doesn't meet that, it won't it won't install at all (again, assuing the installer isn't modified). That floor is TPM 1.2 and Secure Boot.
Bloat is one reason I like macOS.. Yes, it has it's faults (trying to tie you to icloud being one), and by default it does come with the Apple works suite (or iworks - I lose track of what it's called now), but the default install of the OS is fairly lean. But even with macOS, the first thing I do on the rare occasion I have a new machine, I re-install the OS..
The EU are planning to mandate 7 years of support? I think?
If so, Microsoft are already complying with that. The oldest mainstream CPUs Windows 11 supports are the i7-8700 and others from that generation. They were released in Q4 2017, so chips older than that (i7-7700 etc) won't get support beyond October 2025 which is about 8 years later.
My understanding is that Coffee Lake didn’t introduce any new instructions etc. or radically different support chipset, so this cut off is purely business driven and MS drawing a line in the sand.
I would go for a consistent 10 years of support, as per white goods etc.
Yeah, forced obsolescence of hardware is something that MS is trying to learn from Apple. They see how all those fanbois are junking their perfectly fine Macs, just because Apple says it allows to upgrade them to recent software anymore. And if making ungodly amounts of money this way (for which they do not pay the proper taxes, but that's a completely different topic anyway).
It is sad to see that operating systems have become the cash cows for those corporations these days instead of being reliable means to run required applications on them. And no, just switching to Linux is NOT a solution for a lot of (mostly small) business...
Hang on. M$ allows a PC with lower spec CPU etc to run a virtual desktop over the somewhat unreliable internet? I dimly recall doing just that with X Windows in late 80s using a Sun 3 hanging off a Sun 4 server 150 miles away over 64kb/s link. And running FrameMaker which would put Word to shame. But you can bet they’ll be using some bloated protocol to do it now that everyone has > 10 meg broadband.
The only thing that will wake up Microsoft, and the PC maker cartel backing them, is a mass migration to something offering long term support without extra cost. While there are a lot of Linux distributions to choose from, one of the easiest transitions for windows users is Mint.
(No purchase price, but donations welcome.)
I have the latest Linux Mint, 21.2, running on a 13 year old laptop. Granted it is a bit slow, but still useable for most purposes, and very long ago rejected by Windows as too old.
(Note however, 21.2 will not be the latest for long, 21.3 is due out soon, and 22.0 next year!)
I have W10 and Linux Mint 21.2 as a dual boot on my aging PC ("not suitable for upgrade to W11" of course). The only thing that stops me moving permanently to Linux is that I have been using MS Money (2005 version) for years for home finances and have never found a Linux compatible app that is as easy to use and with as wide a range of features (also the old problem about old dogs and new tricks). The solution now seems to be to install it on my W10 laptop and disconnect that completely from the internet when or before the limited update regime arrives. I would welcome any suggestions for any home finance apps for Linux that come close to Money in ease and clarity of use.
Its the M$Office. They don't actually need it in all its 365 glory but the C-Suite are very good at laying down directives that everyone else has to cope with.
For day to day stuff Linux "WksGrt". Its easy to set up, easy to work with and so on. The one thing that Linux has never dealt with well is DRM -- licensing. This is what has given Windows the edge time and again, they have ways of stopping computers from doing stuff that vendors desperately need while Linux lacks any kind of closed system licensing enforcement. (It would be easy to add as well.)
One other thing that Linux lacks is locked/immovable disk tracks. This seems to be part of their license management and it has the rather irritating side effect of prematurely aging disks. I don't know how this translates to solid state disks and I don't particularly want to find out because whatever they do it won't be good.
On the contrary, us eco informed types are very much against MS' practices concerning perfectly good hardware being consigned to waste in the name of pushing their sales (and their manufacturing allies). I have a perfectly good I7-6700K sat at home that won't (officially) run current MS offerings due to arbitrary restrictions; yet is absolutely fine in FOSS land.
One could resort to the various hacks and workarounds to install newer windows on it, but for what that system is used for that's a considerable overhead that I simply CBA to maintain.
I also have a petrol car that I own outright, rather than a PCP-in-perpetuity on some overpriced new motor including a ton of batteries. You have to do an awful lot of mileage before swapping the car becomes sensible from an eco perspective; and definitely not sensible to swap the car every three years for the sake of some arbitary contract to keep the motor industry in stamping out cars.
You are an ecologist that actually uses his (or her) brain. Usually the "green" are just incompetent people that shout slogans or snobs that show everyone how rich they are with their Teslas, or businessmen happening to be selling those Teslas and other not so green but profit making items or ideas or whatever.
Anyway, the issue with Windows 11 is that while it's possible to install 11 on unsupported hardware, or it's possible to run Linux (as I do), it's not a good idea in a work environment. Linux is sadly not good for the common office worker (guess what? it lacks MS Office), and hacking around win11 is not a good idea because we all know that any update can break it. Imagine what will happen if one day a patch disables all of your organization desktop pcs at the same time. So to the landfill they will go, all of them.
I'm mostly concerned how annoying computers at $WORK will be after forced to adopt Windows 11. There the change will certainly happen somewhat slower than Microsoft's deadline but... I'm what may be considered a power user, as opposed to most collegues, and I am not looking forward having to deal with a more shittified OS.
Our family save my brother uses Apple or *Nix systems in our homes. He's on Windows 10 and obvisously unaware of the impending cliff edge.
It doesn't say if he will have an option to continue with 10, or be forced to go to Win 11/a new peecee.
I don't understand why the cost should be per PC. Obviously if MS have to keep security updates going for a group of users, those updates could be rolled out universally for everyone at no real extra cost.
If US/EU/$country government needs security patches, they could pay and then the patches can be made available to everyone. After all, "government's money" is ours really.
Anything post 7 is a UI disaster and horrific for anyone with aging eyes.
My work PC has twice forced a 11 downgrade and then restore to 10 on me.
I do not have admin rights since the first one, I used to have local admin.
Why is the start button in a stupid place?
I have heard about the musical taskbar icons, that is just not usable for me as i KNOW
File manager 1, Firefox 2, my Dev env 3, and so on up to command prompt.
They cannot move as it would be horrible.
My home PC is really locked down but 7 as it was last rebuilt in 2016, used to be XP prior to that.
Can't be arsed to keep changing it, woud need all new hardware which was good with 7 and over spec for XP.
Only issue is RAM, I want more
I have tried to get on with win11 but it is definitely a downgrade from win10 (which was an upgrade from 8 but a downgrade from 7). My main machine meets the TPM requirements (but does not allow the memory integrity to be turned on saying "incompatible drivers" - though the list of incompatible drivers is blank).
So issues I have with win11 - not able to move the taskbar to the top (previously I always had my local machine's task bar at the top - so could tell at a glance if I was on a remote session or not), "open with" - sometimes works mostly doesn't, hyperlinks in apps no-longer opens a web browser with the link - and of course in an app you can't view where the link wants to take you (probably linked to the same issue as before). What is up with the stupid icon menu for right clicking on files? Pretty much always have to "show more options" just to get anything done. I have tried the DISM and SFC repairs but my problems still remain.
Will be nuking from orbit and reinstalling soon - just wondering whether to go back to 10 for some peace of mind.....
I also have a 10 year old laptop that doesn't do TPM (i7 3610QM, 12 GB RAM) which will most likely get a nice linux install when win10 goes out of support....
I'm not moving to Windows 11 until I can move the taskbar (I like mine on the right). I've moved my father to Linux (Mint). I guess my mom and I are also moving sometime around early 2026. Maybe I'll get Win 11 for gaming...hopefully Linux gaming will make that unnecessary.
Is less than 2 years old, and ALREADY obsolete because it has an older TPM and thus not supported.
CPU is recent (9th gen), GPU same so it *should* work.
To be honest, I know of folks who will take their chances and not upgrade 10, still running a 7 machine here.
Checked and to get something that will support 11 is simply beyond my price range.
Microsoft need to seriously look again at continuing to support older TPM and CPU even if a paid upgrade.
The differences between 1.4 and 2.0 or 2.2 are just not that large.
What really sucks is that most of the older machines WILL RUN 11 but some bean counter just arbitrarily
decided not to support them even though the hardware is fully compatible.
What really sucks is that most of the older machines WILL RUN 11 but some bean counter just arbitrarily
What really sucks is the FF 115 ESR is the last release of FF for Win7, and it goes out of support September 2024.
The javascript frameworks disable unsupported browsers, so come September, the internet will gradually become unavailable for Win 7 users, as websites upgrade to new versions of the frameworks.
I don't know which "bean counters" to blame for that.
Do you need mictosoft's security updates? I think not. I never had a lick of problems with win7. My security measures were very simple and were based on common sense.
1) Don't click on every URL you see.
2) Don't open every email you get. Many email clients will show you the real sender's address if you hover over the displayed sender name.
3) Always run an anti-virus / anti-malware product. My preferences are Norton and MalwareBytes.
4) Delete all cookies, cache, temp files. CTRL-SHIFT-DEL will do this for most browsers. Most browsers will also let you set a preference to flush their caches when closing the browser.
5) Don't use the Preview Pane in any email client.
6) Don't use Hotmail or IE. I personally don't think Edge is any better.
7) Run ALL downloads thru the anti-virus / anti-malware app you should already be using.
8) Get an NAS and make regular backups. Do NOT use a cloud service. Remember, a cloud is just a bunch of holes held together with vapor.
9) You really don't need the latest & greatest. If it works just fine for you, then keep using it.
Yes, such as not having to replace auch devices in the first place, because I switched to Linux a long time ago.
In the top ten of the best decisions I ever made, that ranks right in between "getting a cat" and "no longer consuming softdrinks" :D
Over the last few times that MS has produced a new version of Windows and made the old version (even more) obsolete, I have seen people announce that they will no longer touch this rubbish. I see people agree that there are suitable alternatives or workarounds.
Then I see big organisations spend billions on throwing away functional computers that are not up to spec and they go onto the next, short-term, solution. Whether it is corporations, civil service or the NHS, they all spend huge sums that could be better used on swelling the profits of hardware manufacturers and Microsoft.
There are alternatives. Why aren't we using them?
I'd be willing to move to Win11 if MS hadn't insisted on forbidding it from running on my relatively-recent hardware.
I'd be willing to continue running Win10 if I could get support for another 5 years for a one-time price comparable to buying Win11.
But apparently they really do not want to offer me the option of staying in their ecosystem.
Does anyone offer a tool which will take a Win10/WSL2 system and "turn it inside out", doing a semi-automatic conversation to Linux with a contained Windows?
So when support for Windows 10 ends, no problem, I will just erase the Hard drive where it sits and be done with Windows operating systems forever. I went to Linux Mint when the support for Windows 7 ended, losing Windows 10 will not bother me at all. My computer is capable of using Windows 11, but I refuse to do what the Operating System demands because all that stops you from installing and using other Operating systems, so goodbye Windows.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
