Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025. Nearly a year on, plenty of businesses across Orange County and the Inland Empire are still running it. Not out of negligence, but because the machines work, the software on them works, and replacing twenty computers is a real cost against a problem that has not visibly happened yet.
That reasoning was defensible in October. It is weaker now, and it is worth being precise about why.
Microsoft's position is unambiguous: after October 14, 2025 there is no technical support, no software updates, and no security updates or fixes for Windows 10. The computers keep running. Nothing switches off, no screen goes red, no license expires.
That is exactly what makes this risky. There is no failure event to force the decision, just a slowly widening gap between the vulnerabilities being found and the patches you are no longer receiving. Every month that passes, the pile of known, unpatched ways into those machines gets a little taller.
One genuine piece of good news: Microsoft committed to keep delivering security updates for Microsoft 365 apps running on Windows 10 until October 10, 2028. Your Word and Outlook have not been abandoned. The operating system underneath them has.
Microsoft sells Extended Security Updates for organizations that need more time. It is sold per device, per year, for a limited number of years, and the price rises with each year you renew. The program is designed to get more expensive precisely so that it funds a transition rather than replacing one.
ESU buys you security patches. It does not buy you technical support, feature updates, or compatibility with anything new. It is a bridge, and it works well when you know what is on the other side of it.
Some Windows 10 hardware will take Windows 11 directly. Whether yours will comes down mostly to the processor generation and whether the machine has TPM 2.0 available and switched on. A surprising number of business PCs from the last several years qualify and simply have the TPM disabled in firmware, which is a setting change rather than a purchase.
This is the cheapest good outcome, and it is worth checking properly before assuming you need new hardware.
For machines that genuinely cannot take Windows 11, replacement is the end state regardless. The question is only whether you do it on your schedule or after an incident. Staging replacements across two or three budget cycles is almost always cheaper and less disruptive than doing it all at once, which is an argument for starting now rather than an argument for waiting.
In practice the decision rarely turns on the operating system itself. It turns on one of these:
You do not need a migration project to make progress. You need an inventory.
That list is usually enough to turn a vague worry into a budget line and a sequence. Most of the time it also turns out to be smaller than people feared.
We do this inventory for clients as a matter of course, and we are happy to walk through it with a business that is not a client. If you want a straight answer about what you are running and what it would take to move, book a discovery call and we will go through it with you.
No pressure to replace anything. Sometimes the right answer is ESU and a plan for next year. But it should be a decision, not a drift.