Everything You Need to Know About Windows 10's End of Life

If you follow tech news, you’ve likely heard about the impending Windows-pocalypse. On October 14, 2025, Microsoft is officially ending support for Windows 10, which means there won’t be any more security or feature updates for what is, at the time of this post, the most popular desktop operating system in the world.

Why do you need to care? Having a billion essentially unsecured computers connected to the Internet is a recipe for 15 different kinds of disaster. I’ll tell you a bit about what to expect and how to avoid disaster in a bit. First though, a quick history lesson.

A Quick History Lesson

As someone who has covered Windows for a long time now, this feels like a problem that we shouldn’t have to face. After all, when Microsoft launched Windows 10 in 2015, it was soft-pitched as “the last Windows you'll ever buy”. At the time, Microsoft was high on the idea of Windows as a Service. Windows 10 was envisioned as a direct pipeline from Redmond to all of our wallets in the form of new subscription services like OneDrive, Microsoft 365 (aka Office), and Xbox Game Pass.

After only six short years, for reasons that no one really understands, Microsoft ditched the “last Windows” plan and introduced Windows 11. Windows 11 adds support for new hardware and more advanced software, but unfortunately, it didn’t ditch the software-as-a-service business model—it just entrenched it further.

HIstorically, upgrading from one version of Windows to another is pretty straightforward. You might need to add some RAM or update drivers and software so that everything’s compatible, but most computers were good for three or four versions of Windows. In fact, from Windows 7 to 8 to 10, the Microsoft-recommended spec for hardware stayed the same—a 1GHz CPU with 4GB of RAM. (Yes, this would be a laughably underpowered computer, but you have to remember that Windows runs on an enormous number of computers around the world, and many of them are old.)

Even if you wouldn’t have a great experience running Windows 10 on a minspec Windows 7 computer, it would at least let you upgrade the machine so you stay current on security updates. That’s changed with the upgrade to Windows 11. This is really the first time Microsoft has done a clean break—leaving behind an entire era of old hardware—since the earliest days of Windows.

Why did they do this? Well, one of the core additions to Windows 11 is designed to provide added security for users and business against the increasing number of threats they face today. To help with that, they added a requirement for a special hardware module that didn’t exist in the Windows 7 era.

In order to install and run, Windows 11 requires a TPM 2.0 on the device. TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module, and put simply, the TPM provides hardware cryptographic services to software on your computer. The TPM handles everything from random number generation to cryptographic key storage, and it allows services like Secure Boot (which prevents you from booting hacked versions of your OS) and Bitlocker (which provides whole disk encryption tied to your Windows login). TPMs aren’t new technology—the first versions rolled out in the mid 2000s, but the 2.0 revision that Windows 11 requires didn’t start shipping in hardware until 2015.

Because of its tight integration with the low-level processes of the PC, TPMs are typically either soldered directly on the motherboard or integrated with the CPU or chipset itself. Because they need low-level access to the system, you can’t just plug a TPM into a USB port and get access to the services it provides. For the vast majority of computers out there, either your computer shipped with the right TPM and you’re good to go, or it doesn’t, and you won’t be able to run Windows 11 on that machine. As always in the PC space, there are exceptions—some computers in the mid-2010s shipped with their TPMs disabled so you can flip a setting in the BIOS to enable them. Others included an internal connector for a TPM module you can add later.

What Happens In October?

First, your Windows 10 machines aren’t going to turn off on October 26th. The old OS will continue to work indefinitely, you just won’t get security updates that fix vulnerabilities in the OS or virus definitions for Windows Defender (Microsoft’s anti-virus and anti-malware software).

The problem is the sheer number of Windows 10 machines that are still in operation provides an enormous opportunity for bad actors.

According to Statcounter—which analyzes massive amounts of web traffic to determine for OSes, device types, browsers, and more—Windows is about 72% of desktop market share (the rest is divided between MacOS, ChromeOS, and other flavors of Linux. About 60% of those Windows PCs are still running Windows 10, as of Statcounter’s January 2025 reporting. Assuming we don’t see massive adoption of Windows 11 between now and October, that means on October 26, there will be more than a billion computers that no longer get security updates.

A billion unsecured computers represents a huge opportunity for bad actors.

The last time we had a billion essentially unsecured computers connected to the Internet, things were a little different. Windows XP famously had enormous security problems—it shipped at a time when always-on, broadband connections were becoming more common, but before most people had routers that let them share their broadband with multiple devices. Your router doesn’t just let you use Wi-Fi in the bathroom, it also provides basic a basic firewall, which gives your PC the minimum protection from millions of bad actors who are constantly scanning every single IP address on the internet for known vulnerabilities. Before routers were commonplace, most people were connecting directly to the Internet. shudder

How bad was it back then? Well, if you plugged a fully patched Windows XP SP1 machine into a public IP address in 2004, it would be completely hacked and part of a botnet within about 20 minutes. Twenty years later, it still takes about the same time.

The rise of modern routers and a much more robust Windows 10 firewall will protect these newly insecure PCs from the kind of low-effort automated attacks that hit those older Windows XP installs, but new exploits are discovered every day and attackers will undoubtedly find new ways to infect and attack Windows 10 machines post EOL. That will accelerate as other software vendors—I’m looking at web browsers here—stop pushing updates to machines running Windows 10. I imagine it won’t be terribly long before we see Windows 10 machines infected when they load the wrong web page or maybe even the wrong ad.

What Are the Alternatives?

While there are a handful of ways to bypass the TPM requirement during the Windows install, but machines that bypass the TPM requirement are officially unsupported and won’t receive updates. This limbo state is arguably a bit better than running Windows 10, but it doesn’t really address the problem.

If you have a machine that is new enough to run Windows 11 (Intel Core 8 or newer CPUs or any AMD Ryzen CPU), but it’s showing up as unsupported when you try to run the upgrade, you may need to enable the TPM in the BIOS. There isn’t a good universal guide for this, as every computer’s UEFI (that menu you can open before your computer starts Windows to change low-level settings) is different. But the basic gist is that you press del or F1 as your PC is booting to enter the UEFI, then you can search for TPM or Trusted Platform Module and find the settings you need to enable there.

There are a handful of computers that shipped in the mid-2010s with internal connectors on the motherboard for a TPM 2.0 module. You’ll need to consult your motherboard manual to find out if your machine includes one of those headers. (If you don’t know what motherboard is in your computer, you can use HWinfo to get the vendor and model.) If you have a header for the TPM 2.0 module, you need to get a compatible module for your particular motherboard. They’re typically available at Amazon and Newegg.

If none of this applies to you, it’s time for more drastic options. You’ll either need to buy (or build) a new PC or switch to another operating system. The good news about updating your PC is that anything you buy in 2025 is going to feel tons faster than your old PC, even if you’re just grabbing a $400 laptop.

If outlaying cash for a new computer isn’t in the cards, there are several good alternative operating system options. I’m going to spend more time on each of these in future posts, but I’ll give you a couple of good jumping off points so you can do your own research.

MAKE SURE YOU BACKUP EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KEEP FROM YOUR COMPUTER BEFORE YOU INSTALL A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM. INSTALLING A NEW OPERATING SYSTEM BY NECESSITY WILL ERASE EVERYTHING ON YOUR DRIVES.

• If you do all of your work in a browser window, using online tools like Gmail, Canva, etc instead of dedicated desktop apps, consider ChromeOS Flex. Flex is a version of the OS Google ships on Chromebooks designed to be simple to install and run on pretty much any computer. I’ve used it to revitalize early 2010s-era unibody MacBooks and the results feel better than any Chromebook I’ve ever used.

• Linux Mint is a version of Linux designed to be accessible and straightforward for Linux beginners. It ships with a robust suite of applications covering everything from word processors and spreadsheets to 3D modeling and games. The installer is actually a fully functional (but slower because it’s running off of a USB drive) version of the Mint desktop, so you can try it out before you wipe your drive and commit to this new life.

• Any other version of Linux will work too—Ubuntu is a good general purpose Linux distro, Bazzite pulls the good gaming business that Valve built for the Steam Deck into a general purpose distro, Arch is great for masochists, Debian is for people who want to build another version of Linux that’s easier to use. My point isn’t to anger the Linux fans in the audience, but to point out that most versions of Linux are pretty straightforward these days, if all you’re doing is booting into a desktop environment and using a web browser..

What’s Next?

Next week, I promise we’ll talk about something a little bit less Windows-y. I’ve been making new benchmarks over at PC World, so my brain is kind of stuck on Windows right now.

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