Windows 10 died on October 14, 2025. You may remember the funeral. Then Microsoft did what any sensible business does with a product that still runs on hundreds of millions of PCs: it sold a one-year extension. That extension, the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, ends on Tuesday, October 13, 2026. That is 26 days from today, and this time there is nothing for home users behind it.
So here is the second, and final, Windows 10 countdown article. Shorter than the first, because the decisions have not changed. Only the deadline has.
October 13, 2026: the last security update for Windows 10 Home and Pro, even with ESU. After that, every new hole stays open.
What stops on October 13
- Security updates. The monthly patches that close holes attackers are actively using. This is the whole story. Everything else is detail.
- Nothing else, immediately. The PC will boot, sign in, stay activated, run your programs and connect to the internet on October 14 exactly as it did on October 12. “End of support” is not a kill switch, and Microsoft has said so plainly.
Which is exactly why people ignore it. The machine does not look any different. The difference is that from that day on, it is the only computer on your network that never gets its locks changed, and attackers know the date as well as you do. The first Patch Tuesday after a deadline is always followed by the same routine: the fixes ship for Windows 11, someone reads them backwards to find the holes, and the unpatched Windows 10 machines get tried first.
What keeps working, for a while
- Microsoft 365 Apps (Word, Excel, Outlook) keep getting security updates on Windows 10 until October 10, 2028. Microsoft would rather you were unhappy on Windows 10 than happy on Google Docs.
- Microsoft Defender keeps getting its virus definitions into 2028 as well. Useful, but a scanner on an unpatched system is a smoke alarm in a house with the front door off its hinges.
- Edge and Chrome will keep updating for a good while. Browsers historically hang on for years after an OS is retired.
And for businesses: the meter keeps running
The consumer program is one year and done. The commercial ESU program is three years: year one ended with the consumer program, year two runs to October 2027 and year three to October 2028, with the price doubling each year. If you manage company PCs that cannot move yet, that is the road, and it is a toll road. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC and IoT editions have their own, longer dates and are not affected by any of this.
Four sensible things to do with a Windows 10 PC
- Upgrade it, if it will let you. Windows 11 is free for any PC that meets the requirements: a supported processor (roughly 8th-generation Intel or Ryzen 2000 and newer), TPM 2.0 switched on, and Secure Boot. Plenty of “unsupported” PCs only fail because TPM is turned off in the firmware. Check Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update, or run the PC Health Check app, before you assume.
- Replace it, if it is old enough to deserve it. A machine that cannot meet the Windows 11 bar is at least seven years old. A modest new PC costs less than a year of the commercial ESU per seat would over three years, and it will be faster in every way you notice.
- Give it a second life. Linux Mint, Ubuntu or ChromeOS Flex turn an “obsolete” laptop into a perfectly good browsing, email and streaming machine with years of updates ahead of it. If the only things it does are a web browser and printing, this is the honest answer, and it is free.
- Or take it off the network. The workshop PC that runs the CNC software from 2014, the one plugged into the embroidery machine: those can live on unpatched, as long as they stop touching the internet and your other machines. Air gaps are the oldest security control there is, and they still work.
The one thing not on the list is “keep using it online as normal”. That was a defensible choice for the past year because the patches kept coming. In 26 days it stops being one.
Not sure what you have?
Press Win + R, type winver and press Enter. If it says Windows 10, look at the version: anything on 22H2 with ESU shows updates through October 2026 in Windows Update. To see whether Windows 11 is on the table, open a PowerShell window and ask the firmware about the TPM:
Get-Tpm | Select-Object TpmPresent, TpmReady, ManufacturerVersion
Confirm-SecureBootUEFITpmPresent True and Confirm-SecureBootUEFI True are most of the battle. If TPM shows False on a PC from 2018 or later, it is almost certainly just switched off in the BIOS.
Stuck with a PC that fails the check, or a fleet of them? Post the model and the error in the Help forum. Between us we have talked a lot of machines across the line, and the best answer earns points on Top of the Stack.