As with other Microsoft operating system, it has been announced that come the 14th of October, 2025, Windows 10 support will official end.
Now while Windows 10 won’t just stop working, what it does mean is that there will be no more updates to the operating system eventually leaving it vulnerable to attacks.
I can still remember back when Microsoft dropped support for both Windows XP and Windows 7. Unsurprisingly, when it came to end of life for Windows 8 and 8.1, well, no one really cared or dear I say, really noticed.
See, in my opinion, both Windows 8 and 8.1 were such a flop in the market that the userbase either decided to just stick with Windows 7 or jump to Window 10. It didn’t help that Microsoft completely changed how the end user interacted with their applications by removing the start menu as it had been known.
So while the cycle of Windows operating systems reaching end of life is nothing new, the end of Windows 10 brings along another problem this time however. See when Microsoft dropped support for Windows 7, most of the hardware out there was more than capable of running Windows 10. So while you might not have liked the new version of Windows, upgrading wasn’t really a problem.
This time, it’s a little different. For common-sense reasons that still don’t make sense to me, Microsoft has decided that unless your hardware matches a few key specifics, you just flat out can’t run Windows 11 on your hardware. Or at least you won’t have Microsoft’s blessing that is. So why is this a problem?
As I mentioned before, when support for Windows 7 ended, most computers were able to just upgrade and run Windows 10 perfectly fine. Now with Windows 10 coming to end of life, there is still a lot of good hardware out there that would be more than capable of running Windows 11 but because of arbitrary requirements that Microsoft has come up with, there will be a large amount of hardware that will essentially just become e-waste.
Because Windows 10 won’t just stop working, you could continue to keep running it but as time goes one, your computer will become more and more vulnerable to attacks as security bugs are found that will no longer be patched. So to stay secure and keep up with the times, you will either need to upgrade if you can or buy hardware that meets Microsoft’s requirements.
Personally, with the way Microsoft has been taking Windows, I’m kind of done. I’ve moved to a Mac in my personal life and for hardware that doesn’t meet the requirements, I’m really considering running some flavor of Linux.