Windows 10 End of Support

On 14 October 2025, Microsoft formally ended free support for Windows 10. Ten years and three months after the OS shipped on 29 July 2015 — a clean ten-year lifecycle, in line with the same treatment given to Windows 7 and 8.1.

But this EOL carried a colour no previous Windows EOL had. In the month of the cut-off, StatCounter still put 41.7% of desktop Windows on Windows 10 (Windows 11 held 55.2%). When XP retired in April 2014, and when Windows 7 retired in January 2020, nowhere near that share of PCs reached the last day on the dying OS.

And the wall blocking the upgrade to Windows 11 was the one built four years earlier: TPM 2.0, 8th-generation Intel Core or later, Secure Boot.

400 Million PCs Left Hanging

Right to Repair Europe's September 2025 estimate was roughly 400 million — Windows 10 PCs that could not satisfy Windows 11's official hardware requirements and therefore had no sanctioned upgrade path.

Most of those PCs were not physically broken. Only their OS support had run out. The group's coordinator, Cristina Ganapini, put it this way: "Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows 10 could make 400 million computers obsolete — not because they're broken, but because of software."

That International E-Waste Day fell on the same date — 14 October — was widely quoted as irony beyond coincidence.

ESU: $30 and the Free Paths

Microsoft's lifeline was the Extended Security Updates (ESU) programme. For the first time, ESU — historically enterprise-only — was opened to consumers. Three paths, all of them requiring a Microsoft account:

• Paid: a one-time US$30 purchase — not an annual fee; a single licence covers up to 10 devices
• Free path 1: use Windows Backup to sync your settings to the cloud
• Free path 2: redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points

Organisations and schools buy through Volume Licensing instead: an annual subscription at $61 per device for Year One, doubling every consecutive year, to a maximum of three years (through October 2028). The charges are cumulative — start in Year Two and you still pay for Year One.

The EEA got different terms. After pressure from Euroconsumers and national consumer groups, Microsoft dropped the Windows Backup requirement for free enrolment in the European Economic Area in September 2025. A Microsoft account sign-in remains necessary, and devices must re-authenticate at least every 60 days to keep receiving updates.

And then the deadline moved. Microsoft had framed consumer ESU as a single year, ending 13 October 2026. On 25 June 2026 the company extended it by another year — through 12 October 2027 — not with a press release but with an editor's note appended to a Windows Experience Blog post from June 2025: "the Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for personal use devices is being provided for an additional year, with coverage now available through Oct. 12, 2027."

E-waste and the Environmental Argument

Right to Repair Europe, PIRG, 404 Media and others called the Windows 10 EOL an e-waste disaster.

• If discarded, those machines would generate over 700 million kg of e-waste (Right to Repair Europe's estimate)
• When the asset-management vendor Lansweeper scanned roughly 27 million PCs across about 60,000 organisations in October 2022, 42.76% failed the Windows 11 CPU requirement (14.66% failed the TPM test)
• The environmental cost of "replace your still-working PC with a brand-new Copilot+ PC" marketing

Microsoft's framing was consistent. Its migration blog post states that Windows 11 PCs are up to 2.3x faster than Windows 10 PCs, and that new Windows 11 PCs have seen a reported 62% drop in security incidents — both the company's own claims, not independently established figures.

The counter-argument: at the XP and Windows 7 EOLs, hardware requirements were essentially unchanged, so users could upgrade the same PC to the new OS. At the Windows 10 → 11 boundary, the OS's own security requirements physically excluded older machines. It looks like the same kind of EOL; the mechanism underneath is different.

It also reached a courtroom. In August 2025 Lawrence Klein, a San Diego resident, filed a complaint for public injunctive relief asking that Microsoft be required to keep supporting Windows 10 free of charge until its share of the Windows install base falls below 10%.

Hundreds of Millions Unpatched

The security concern is about the machines that never enrol. Households, small businesses, legacy terminals in schools and hospitals — none of them receive a fix for anything discovered after the cut-off.

The comparison usually reached for is WannaCry (2017). That was ransomware — malware that encrypts the files on a machine and demands payment for the decryption key — welded to a self-propagating exploit of an SMB v1 flaw (EternalBlue), so it spread across a network without anyone opening an attachment. But the popular memory of it is wrong in a way that matters here. By Kaspersky's count, over 98% of infected machines were Windows 7; on XP the worm typically crashed rather than propagated. The damage was concentrated not on the long-dead OS but on a supported OS that had not been patched — a distinction that keeps getting lost in the Windows 10 EOL argument.

Afterwards — The Migration Did Not Happen

The months after the cut-off contradicted the assumption that a deadline forces a purchase. StatCounter's Windows 10 share rose from 41.7% in October 2025 to 42.7% in November and 44.7% in December. The decline came later: by July 2026 it stood at 29.9%, against 68.9% for Windows 11. Nine months past the deadline, close to one machine in three was still on Windows 10.

The one-year ESU extension reads as an answer to that number.

An OS Update as a Policy Event

The Windows 10 EOL will be remembered not as another generational OS handover, but as the event that confirmed an era in which a major OS update is an economic, environmental and regulatory event in its own right.

From the technology side: TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, VBS, Pluton, Copilot+ PC — the line Microsoft drew four years earlier simply closed on schedule in 2025.

From the user side: PCs bought between 2015 and 2019, physically intact, were placed in an "officially cannot move on" state.

From the environmental side: 700 million kg of candidate e-waste, and tailwind for the right-to-repair movement seeking legislation in the EU.

Windows 10 is remembered alongside the line that it would be the last version of Windows. That was never an official commitment: at Microsoft Ignite in May 2015, the company's developer evangelist Jerry Nixon said "because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10", and Microsoft neither retracted nor ratified it. What the company did formally promise was a one-year free upgrade for Windows 7 SP1 and 8.1 users. That the story ran out after ten years is what gives this EOL its weight.