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Hands-On Windows 141: Windows 10 End of Life
00:10:32
Moving on From Windows 10
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- [00:01]
Paul Throt
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take a Look at Windows 10 and its end of life and what your choices are.
- [00:07]
Ryan Reynolds
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- [00:29]
Paul Throt
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Chris Gethard
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Paul Throt
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Chris Gethard
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Ryan Reynolds
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- [01:14]
Paul Throt
This is Twit. Hello everybody and welcome back to Hands and Windows. I'm Paul Throt. I'm back in the United States. Hooray. And I thought this was a good time to talk a little bit about what, what you can do if you're still using Windows 10. So less than six months to go before this thing hits end of life in October 2025 as we record this, you have a perfectly good, or at least a reasonably good PC running Windows 10. What can you do? Right? Because this thing is going to go out of support. Part of the history here just is that when Windows 10 came around, it was 2015, it was 10 years ago. Free upgrade for Windows 7 and Windows 8. If you took that upgrade, it's unlikely you're still using that computer, but I suppose it's possible. But the big thing with Windows 10, other than the UI changes and all that kind of stuff, was the the app platform, which has kind of come and gone. And also Windows as a service, which has evolved and is now called continuous innovation. It's probably called something else now, but they've kind of changed that around. But here we are, it's 20, 25, we're 10 years in. Microsoft is going to retire Windows 10. For the most part you might have a computer that depending on when you got it, it could be several years old. Windows 10 is, or sorry, Windows 11, the latest version of Windows is only supported on a class of computers that are based on chipsets that are roughly at this point say I'm going to say about eight years old. Eight or nine years old or newer. The newer the better. Of course, TPM 2.0 is super important now in Windows 11. Basically an 8th gen intel or equivalent AMD is what you're looking at. If you have something older than that, I don't know, you know, it might be time to upgrade. But if you have something fairly recently, you know what, what are the choices? Right? So there are five basic choices. The way I see it, the first one is to do nothing, right? You can keep using Windows 10. I feel like this would be dangerous, stupid. Depending on the situation, maybe this is a special use PC. Maybe it's something you only use sometimes. You don't really see the point in updating it. If you're not online or not online a lot, it might be okay. You might want to look into keeping up to date, maybe with even third party security products. Make sure you're using a browser that's completely up to date that isn't Microsoft Edge in this case. I wouldn't do anything important on that computer personally. But you know, again this is kind of a personal decision. I don't recommend that. One of the other options you have is kind of interesting. Microsoft has this thing called extended security Updates for Windows 10. So this is a program that they have offered to businesses in the past. Windows 10, I'm sorry, Windows 7 and Windows XP before it both had similar programs where if you were a business or part of a business, you could pay and get extra security for up to three years.
- [04:28]
Chris Gethard
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- [05:25]
Paul Throt
Other fees may apply for Windows 10 for the first time. They're going to bring this to consumers, but they're only doing it for one year for consumers. And so the interesting part of that is that you could pay $30 and get support for one more year. As it says here. This is the Microsoft Learn website. There's not going to be any new features, there's not going to be design changes. They're not going to take any customer requests for non security updates. They may fix things that the extended security updates cause if there are problems there. And they will fix security problems, of course. But that's 12 months. So you could buy yourself 12 months if you think that might make a difference and you don't mind spending $30, that's probably not a bad option. Kind of a holding pattern, right? So that's, that's a, that's a possibility. You could also upgrade to Windows 11, right? So on this particular computer, I'm using this remotely. So I'm remote desktopping into the Windows 10 PC. Here you can see I've got these updates I'm waiting to reboot and install, but it's also offering me Windows 11, humorously the previous version of Windows 11. But this particular computer is based on an 8th gen Intel CPU, so it's actually supported. So I actually could update this thing to Windows 11, probably will at some point. But if you don't see this offer or if you go and download Windows 11 and try to install it, it says, hey, your computer is not supported. You have options, right? We've discussed this on the podcast. I have a book and I also do this on my site. I explain the workarounds you can do to get Windows 11 to install even though it's not supposed to work. That should honestly be fine and it should be safe. Microsoft has threatened that people who do that might face a situation where they don't even get security updates. That's never actually happened and I can't imagine they would ever actually do that. But it's not a bad option for those, especially if you're not using it a lot or if it just works great. And why not? And what's the difference if you feel comfortable using it, you know, doing one of the workarounds that's A I would say this is a reasonably safe option depending on your needs. And this is a little out there maybe, but you could consider switching to Linux, right? So there are some high level consumer oriented distributions. Yeah, I brought a few up here. Like Ubuntu is quite famous, or Linux Mint or Zorin, this elementary and so forth. There's a lot of different Linux distributions. But the nice thing about this is that even though it may seem daunting when you download these operating systems, you have to actually take that ISO file, which is what the download is, and then put it onto a USB fob or a disk that you can use to boot the computer with. You don't actually have to install it, you could just try it that way. So Ubuntu is a particularly good one because it now natively supports BitLocker, which is the disk encryption scheme that Microsoft uses with Windows. So those two things can sit side by side without you having to do anything to make that work. Which is kind of appealing. Obviously if you use certain especially Microsoft apps or Windows apps, The Adobe stuff, OneDrive, Microsoft Office, the desktop version, that stuff is not available on Linux. So that might make that a non starter. But if you're using mostly web apps and depending on the use case, that might be an option, it's kind of a nuke it from orbit type option I guess. But again you can just test it with that disk, the USB disk that you create from the distribution. So it's something to consider. The other option is this is kind of a two or three pronged option is you could do what Microsoft wants you to do and what the industry wants you to do and buy a new computer. And I know that's not a great option. None of these are great options frankly. But if the computer is 8, 10 years old, honestly this is the right time for this. There is this new generation of computers we've been talking a lot about, copilot PCs. I happen to like the Snapdragon ARM based versions quite a bit, but the, well the intel and especially the AMD versions are quite good as well. The Copilot plus PC is kind of a way to future proof the purchase in a sense like it won't be out of date in a few years. And some of them, depending on the model, are as inexpensive as say 6 or $700, although it's typically a little bit over a thousand for a laptop type Copilot plus PC. So it's an option. I know it's not great, but I have to throw it in There. The other thing you could try that's related to this is you could buy a new PC but don't buy a Windows PC, right? You could buy a Chromebook. Those tend to be a lot less expensive. Depending again on your use case, it's going to be a lot of web apps, but you can also run Android apps. There are powerful Chromebooks now that are quite good actually, even gaming Chromebooks. And you could look at a Mac, right, of course. And so like a MacBook Air is probably about a thousand dollars now to start, but really nice configuration and something that will last a long time as well. So that's kind of where we're at. I mean, this particular computer, I have to be honest, Even though Windows 11 is supported, this is not a great computer for Windows 11. It's old 8th gen. This thing's got to be. This is a Surface Book 2. So I'm going to guess and say probably, like I said, 8 or 9 years old at this point. It's, you know, it's just, it's kind of creaky. It's not, you know, Even running Windows 10, it's not running really, really well. I think this would be a prime opportunity for replacement. And of course you have to figure out what to do with this hardware once you do that. And this one's getting pretty close to recycle time. Although you could kind of combine two of the ideas here and maybe still use this in a limited way either with Linux or keep using Windows 10, or even forcing the upgrade if you had to for Windows 11. But then get a new computer for yourself. And maybe this is something you use, you know, for a child or someone who doesn't use a computer a lot in your house or for a special case like a media server or something like that. But you know, for the most part, anything this older, older, I think it's time, you know, to move on, unfortunately. So there you go. I can't imagine you enjoyed this one too much, but hopefully you found it informative. Hopefully it gave you some ideas what to do next. And we will have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. Find out more at twittalk tv. H O W thank you to everyone for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. You can find out more about Club Twit as well at Twit tv. Club Twit. I'll see you next week.