Lots of PCs are poised to fall off the Windows 10 update cliff one year from today

One year from today, on October 14, 2025, Microsoft will stop releasing security updates for PCs that are still running Windows 10.

Organizations and individuals will still be able to pay for three more years of updates, with prices that go up steadily each year (Microsoft still hasn’t provided pricing for end users, only saying that it will release pricing info “closer to the October 2025 date.”) But for most PCs running Windows 10, the end of the line is in sight.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal; the last dregs of support for Windows 7 and Windows 8 dried up in January 2023, and the world didn’t end even though some PCs continue to run those OS versions. But there are three things about the end of Windows 10 support that are slightly different from other recent end-of-life dates:

A historically short time window between when the operating system was replaced and when security updates stopped.
- Windows 8 was replaced by Windows 10 in late 2015, and support ended in January 2023; Windows 7 was replaced in late 2012, and mainstream support ended in January 2020 (additional updates were paid and not officially available to end-users). In both cases, that’s a little over seven years between replacement and retirement, compared to just over four years for Windows 10.
A historically large percentage of the user base still actively uses the fading operating system.
- StatCounter data from September of 2024 suggests that Windows 10 is still running on nearly two-thirds of all active Windows systems worldwide, compared to around one-third for Windows 11. Windows 8 was only running on 3 percent of Windows PCs by January 2022; Windows 7 was running on 35 percent of active Windows PCs in January 2019 (which explains why Microsoft offered extended update support).
- Windows 11 will close some of that gap over the next year, but it’s possible that Windows 10 could still be the most-used version of Windows when its mainstream support ends.
Many Windows 10 PCs can’t (officially) be updated to Windows 11 because they don’t meet the system requirements.
- Exacerbating Windows 11’s slow adoption is the fact that PCs released before 2018 or so simply can’t run it without workarounds.
- There’s really no precedent for this; old versions of Windows (from roughly 3.1 to Vista) were gated mostly by easy-to-understand things like hardware speed and capability, and the benefits of buying a new PC once every two or three years were more readily apparent. But hardware replacement cycles got longer, and there was technically nothing stopping anyone from installing Windows 10 on any hardware that shipped with Windows Vista or newer, aside from the cost of the license and the user’s patience with old hardware. Windows 11’s system requirements cut off a surprising number of perfectly functional PCs for sometimes nebulous security-related reasons.

All of these factors taken together are setting us up for something we haven’t really seen in the Windows ecosystem before: a majority or a large minority of active Internet-connected PCs that will suddenly stop getting security updates, leaving either paid support, a new PC, or a switch to an entirely different operating system as the easiest paths forward.

Now that we’re a year out from the end of Windows 10, and because Windows 10 does not appear to be going anywhere, we’re publishing a series of articles exploring alternatives to spending money, either on a new PC or on continued Windows 10 updates.

The path of least resistance is probably upgrading to an unsupported Windows 11 installation since the operating system will mostly run any software you’re currently using in Windows 10. We’re updating our guide for upgrading to Windows 11 to account for some small changes in the 24H2 update—whether you’re using a supported PC that hasn’t been configured properly or an unsupported PC. We’re also planning to publish articles about the experience of actually using Windows 11 day-to-day on an unsupported PC, and we’re also exploring alternate operating systems like Linux and ChromeOS Flex.

All of these are reasonable options for keeping an old-but-working system up to date without spending money, assuming it’s already got a properly activated Windows 10 installation. Whether you’re trying to keep your own hardware going or you’re trying to make some old hardware useful again, at least one of these should be a workable alternative to going over the Windows 10 update cliff a year from now.