Windows 10 Is Dead. Your Laptop Probably Isn’t.

Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 on 14 October 2025. No more feature updates, no more free security patches, no more technical support. For a great many perfectly good laptops, that date was presented as an execution notice.

It isn’t one. There are four sensible ways forward, and only one of them involves buying a new computer. Here they are, honestly assessed.

First, work out whether your machine can run Windows 11

Plenty of machines that display the “this PC doesn’t meet requirements” message are only failing on one setting, and it is often a setting that is switched off rather than absent.

Windows 11 requires a 64-bit processor from Microsoft’s approved list, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, UEFI with Secure Boot capability, and TPM 2.0. The two that trip people up are Secure Boot and TPM. Most business laptops from roughly 2016 onwards have a TPM 2.0 chip fitted, but it may be disabled in the BIOS, and the machine may have been set up in legacy BIOS mode rather than UEFI.

Enabling TPM is usually a matter of pressing F2, F10 or Delete during startup and finding a setting called something like “TPM Device”, “PTT” on Intel systems, or “fTPM” on AMD ones. Switching from legacy BIOS to UEFI is more involved and can require converting the disk partition scheme, which is a job worth having someone competent do — get it wrong and the machine will not boot.

The genuine hard limit is the processor list. Intel 8th generation and later are supported; 7th generation and earlier are not, regardless of how capable the chip is. That is a policy decision rather than a technical one, but it is Microsoft’s to make and it stands.

Option two: pay for extended security updates

Microsoft offers a consumer Extended Security Updates programme that keeps critical security patches flowing to Windows 10 machines for a limited period beyond the end-of-support date. It buys time and nothing else — no new features, no bug fixes, no technical support.

It is a reasonable stopgap if you need a few more months to plan, and a poor long-term answer. Check Microsoft’s own page for the current terms and end dates, as the details have shifted more than once.

Option three: change what the machine runs

This is the option most people have never considered, and for a lot of households it is the best one.

If your laptop is used for browsing, email, YouTube, banking, online shopping, Google Docs or Office on the web, and video calls, then Windows is doing very little for you that a lighter operating system could not do better on old hardware.

ChromeOS Flex is Google’s free operating system for repurposing existing PCs and Macs. It is essentially a Chromebook installed onto hardware you already own. It boots in seconds, updates itself automatically, is very difficult to infect with malware, and runs happily on machines that Windows 11 has locked out. The trade-off is real and you should understand it before committing: it runs web applications and not much else. No installed Microsoft Office, no Photoshop, no Windows-only software, and no Android app support on Flex. For a machine used almost entirely in a browser, none of that is missed. For anyone who depends on a specific Windows program, it is a non-starter.

Linux is the other route. Distributions such as Linux Mint or Zorin OS are designed to feel familiar to Windows users and run well on modest hardware. You get a full desktop with real installed applications — LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP — and no licensing cost. The learning curve is gentler than its reputation suggests, but there is one, and some hardware and peripherals need a bit of patience.

We convert machines to ChromeOS routinely and have a number of them on the shelf at any given time. It is genuinely the right answer for a lot of people, and it turns a laptop that Microsoft has written off into something quick and secure.

Option four: replace it — but not necessarily with something new

If your current machine is genuinely at the end of the road — failing battery, dying screen, 4GB of soldered RAM and a mechanical hard drive — then replacing it is fair enough. The question is what you replace it with.

The Windows 10 cutoff pushed an enormous volume of corporate hardware onto the second-hand market in a short space of time. Businesses replaced fleets not because the machines were worn out but because they could not run Windows 11. That is why 8th, 10th and 11th generation business laptops — fully Windows 11 capable, three or four years old, professionally maintained — are currently available at prices that have very little to do with their remaining useful life.

Buying one of those solves the problem completely, for a fraction of new prices, without causing another laptop to be manufactured.

Whatever you do, don’t just carry on regardless

The one genuinely bad option is continuing to use an unpatched Windows 10 machine for banking, email and shopping while pretending the deadline did not happen. Unsupported operating systems accumulate known, unfixed vulnerabilities, and those get actively exploited. If the machine is used for anything involving money or personal data, pick one of the routes above.

If you are not sure which category your laptop falls into, tell us the make and model and we will tell you what your options are — including when the answer is “leave it alone, it’s fine”. We have Windows 11 and ChromeOS machines in stock if it turns out you do need one.