Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)
October 14, 2025, marks the end of support and security updates for the Home and Pro versions of Windows 10. That means it’s also the end of official guaranteed feature plus security updates for Windows PCs that don’t meet Windows 11’s hardware requirements .
Viewed from early 2022, that date is still comfortably far off. Lots of Windows 10 PCs will break over the next 3. 5 years, and plenty of people who actually want to upgrade to nicer or faster hardware will have opportunities to do so. But as someone who enjoys repairing, maintaining, and upgrading older hardware to keep it useful, we’ll be peering over the edge of that Windows 10 update cliff before we know it.
The question is: what happens in order to that hardware when Windows ten goes away? Running Windows 11 on unsupported hardware is one possible solution, but we have no idea for how long Microsoft will actually allow installing, running, and updating Home windows 11 on older PCs; the company could cut off these computers’ security updates tomorrow, or it could allow them to be able to run the new OS indefinitely, and that uncertainty is hard to plan around.
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