Windows 10 end of support

Technology
1

Well “D-Day”, or is that EOS day came and went.

As anticipated none of my W10 PCs and VMs spontaneously exploded, or went AWOL and randomly started downloading viruses.

I have (on one VM) downloaded Avira free to try, I wasn’t clear that Bitdefender will give real time protection without signing up for an account.

I have set up a W11 VM and will probably transition anything useful that the W10 VM does to it but for now it is a test bed for figuring out the best AV etc - once I am happy I will update my wife’s machine.

I wonder if the black hats have a load of viruses up their sleeves to target W10 vulnerabilities on unmaintained machines but I’d be slightly surprised TBH.

I haven’t signed up for the extended support as, AFAIK, that requires tying the local machine to your M$ account, and I hear W11 is getting harder and harder to run with local accounts only. I do have an M$ account (might be tricky to figure out he password though) but I do not see why my PC has to be tied to it to function.

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2

I bought a W11 PC months ago to avoid any probs with my Adobe Creative Cloud a/c.

Now my work-a-day laptop is in the W10 twightly zone - I have another identical which the W11 device replaced - so I thought I would have a go at this.

Switch Windows 10 to Linux Mint - here’s how.

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Depending how old your PC is, there are tools that can install W11 without the TPM 2.0 requirement.

4

How much does Windows 10 ESU cost?

You can enroll in ESU in one of the following three ways:

  • At no additional cost if you are syncing your PC Settings.

  • Redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points.

  • One-time purchase of $30 USD or local currency equivalent plus applicable tax.

5

It doesn’t look entirely  legit but it seems possible to install the LTSC version which will be supported until 2031.

As the guy says - following dodgy instructions from a years old Reddit post which involve running scripts from a questionable website as “admin” is not the most sane thing to do, but it seems to work.

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6

I am considering buying another SSD so I can install W11 on my high spec laptop that unfortunately doesn’t quite comply with the Win11 requirements.

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Which part of the W11 minimum spec doesn’t it meet?

The TPM 2.0 nonsense?

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Some older motherboards that do support TPM had it disabled by default in earlier BIOS versions. In these cases you can either enable it in the BIOS or update the BIOS.

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Yes the TPM part

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10

Then Rufus and a cheap Win 11 key are your friends.

Rufus is basically a custom Windows installation tool that allows you to decide what W10/11 features get installed and you can set it to ignore MS hardware requirements such as TPM 2.0.

I would have done this for my gaming PC, but I’m building a new one in 2026, so I don’t see any point in inflicting W11 on my 2011 CPU and Motherboard.

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