On the off-chance you're not already aware and are just joining us like Ash Williams in the original ending of Army of Darkness, Microsoft's official support of Windows 10 will end on October 14, 2025. But rather than a hard cutoff, Microsoft is continuing to blur the edge of this deadline by extending support in specific use cases.
The latest end-of-support caveat is that the Windows 10 versions of the Microsoft 365 suite of applications—that's your PowerPoint slides, Word documents, and your Excel spreadsheets—will continue to receive security updates for another three years, until October 10, 2028 (via ). That said, Microsoft will still —especially if they encounter an issue in the Windows 10 version of any of their Office apps that can't be replicated in Windows 11.
That doesn't mean that there's nothing to see here as far as Microsoft is concerned, though. I could make a joke about Microsoft's current approach to security updates, given that the company recently told Windows 11 users as it was apparently pivotal to a recent system security update. However, given that the company has just announced plans to , I'm not really in a joking mood.
If you happen to still be on Windows [[link]] 10—recent Steam surveys suggest this for a staggering amount of PC gamers—then you've got a few options, which Ian outlines in his. [[link]] It had been previously announced that commercial customers and educational institutions still would have the option to beyond October, but Microsoft are now offering the option for (ESU) to individual consumers as well.
Otherwise, if you're not a huge fan of Microsoft, you've got the option of that could keep your Windows 10 machine safe for the next half a decade. Failing that, .