Windows 10 Support ends 14th October 2025. If your PC is stuck on Windows 10 and can’t upgrade to Windows 11 because of hardware requirements, here are some options.
- Buy a new PC
- Ignore the end-of-support deadline completely
- Upgrade necessary components
- Get Windows 11 installed bypassing requirements
- Install an alternative operating system (OS)
- Pay Microsoft for extended support
Buy a new PC
Perhaps the best thing if your machine is quite old, slow or seen better days. Plus you’ll probably get better features like battery life, screen resolution/size/quality, USB-C socket etc.
Ignore the end-of-support deadline
If the machine isn’t connected to the internet there’s nothing to worry about – it’ll keep doing the same just as it does now.
If it’s connected to the internet, it’ll gradually be exposing more and more security risks so wouldn’t be advisable to use the machine for anything requiring a password – most definitely your email, shopping or banking. If you don’t do these things and don’t store data that’s you’d miss if it was gone, that machine can still be used because if it gets hacked then there’s not going to be a problem. Otherwise, you put all accounts, your identity and data at risk.
Upgrade necessary components
For a laptop this won’t be possible, but for a desktop PC it’s usually possible to upgrade components. To officially allow Windows 11 to be installed and supported upgrades usually required are a new motherboard and CPU, and often new RAM, but the rest of the existing machine can be reused (such as case, fans, cooling systems, graphics card, keyboard, mouse etc)
The upgraded components can be picked up for quite cheap either low-spec new or second hand, or more can be spend for better components.
Get Windows 11 installed bypassing requirements
It’s possible to bypass the hardware requirements to get Windows 11 on a machine if officially won’t go on. Microsoft usually block updates for Windows 11 if it finds the required hardware isn’t there so going this route isn’t much better than just ignoring Windows 10 support deadline and staying on that because you will still be in a situation without the latest security updates.
Install an alternative operating system (OS)
This is something we’ve done for customers quite a bit over the years every time Microsoft’s ends support of an OS. If you just want a machine for casual access to the web, email, some document work and storage for photos you don’t need to run Windows, but an alternative free OS such as Linux is a good option. We often put Ubuntu Linux on customers PCs which is a well-developed and supported OS that’s easy enough to use and runs on old hardware much better than Windows. We just had a customer’s machine that originally shipped with Windows Vista and we put Ubuntu on (as well a cheap RAM and SSD upgrade) and the machine runs so much better (probably than if ever did).
Pay Microsoft for Extended Security Updates (ESU)
When Windows 7 support ended, many businesses and the public sector paid Microsoft to continue supporting it. This time, Micrsoft is allowing normal home users to extend their support too, and it’s estimated to cost somewhere around £25-30 per year (for a maximum of two year). When that ends, you’ll be in the same situation again.
Image Credit: Windows image by Bolly Holly Baba @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/dcmot/
