Windows 10 End of Support: What Changed and How to Move to Windows 11 Pro

Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14, 2025. Version 22H2 was the last one. If you are reading this on a Windows 10 machine, it still works exactly as it did, which is why so many of these PCs are still in service almost a year later.

This guide covers what actually changed on that date, how to tell whether a given PC can move to Windows 11, and what your realistic options are when it cannot.

What end of support actually means

From October 14, 2025, Microsoft stopped providing three things for Windows 10:

• Quality updates, which includes security and reliability fixes
• Feature updates and new features
• Technical support

What continues: the operating system runs, your licence remains valid, your applications launch. Nothing switches off. The change is that every vulnerability found in Windows 10 from that date onward stays open on an unenrolled machine.

That distinction matters because the risk builds slowly rather than arriving all at once. A Windows 10 PC was no less secure on October 15, 2025 than it was the day before. It is meaningfully less secure now, and it will keep getting worse, because the gap between patched and unpatched widens every Patch Tuesday.

Is your hardware eligible for Windows 11?

Most machines that fail the Windows 11 check fail on one of two things: TPM 2.0 or the processor generation. The full minimum requirements are:

There is also an operating system requirement for upgrading in place: the PC must be running Windows 10 version 2004 or later, with the September 14, 2021 security update or later installed.

The fastest way to check a single machine is the PC Health Check app, which Microsoft provides for Windows 10 Home, Pro and Pro for Workstations. To check the TPM specifically, press Windows and R, type `tpm.msc` and look at the specification version. If it reports 1.2, or says a compatible TPM cannot be found, check the UEFI firmware before giving up. On a lot of business hardware from 2017 onwards the TPM is present but disabled by default, often listed under a vendor name such as PTT on Intel systems or fTPM on AMD.

That single setting is worth checking on every machine before you write any of them off. It is the most common reason a perfectly capable PC reports as ineligible.

The upgrade path, step by step

For an eligible machine, the in place upgrade keeps your files, applications and settings.

1. Back up first, and verify the backup. An in place upgrade is reliable, but "reliable" is not "guaranteed", and this is the cheapest insurance you will ever buy.
2. Check application compatibility. Microsoft's own data puts Windows 10 to Windows 11 compatibility above 99 percent, but the exception that matters is the one your business runs on. Check the vendor's support matrix for anything specialised: accounting packages, CAD, laboratory or machine control software.
3. Confirm eligibility with PC Health Check, and enable the TPM in firmware if that is what is blocking you.
4. Make sure you have the right licence. A Windows 10 Home machine upgrading to Windows 11 Pro needs a Pro licence. A Windows 10 Pro machine carries its edition across.
5. Run the upgrade through Windows Update on unmanaged machines, or through your management tooling if the fleet is managed.
6. Verify activation afterwards, under Settings, System, Activation. This is the step people skip, and it is the one that surfaces licensing problems while you can still do something about them.

Budget the better part of an hour per machine including the download, and rather more if you are doing this over a slow connection.

If your hardware cannot run Windows 11

This is the part most upgrade guides skip, so let us be direct about the choices and what each one actually costs.

Replace the machine. This is the only option that fully solves the problem, and on hardware old enough to lack TPM 2.0 it is often the right one on economics alone. A PC from 2016 has usually reached the point where the electricity, the failing drive and the lost hours cost more than the replacement.

Enrol in Extended Security Updates. ESU is a paid programme that keeps critical and important security updates flowing. The device must be on Windows 10 version 22H2. For businesses buying through volume licensing, it costs 61 USD per device for year one, and the price doubles each consecutive year, for a maximum of three years. It is also cumulative: if you skip year one and enrol in year two, you pay for both. Technical support is not included. ESU is a bridge with a toll booth, and the toll rises, which is exactly the incentive Microsoft intended. Use it to buy planning time, not to postpone the decision.

Isolate the machine. If something must stay on Windows 10 because a vendor application will not certify anywhere else, or because it drives a machine tool or an instrument that costs more than the building, take it off the general network. No internet access, no email, no shared credentials with the rest of the domain. This genuinely reduces risk, but it only works if the isolation is real. A machine that is "mostly offline" is online.

Move to Linux. For a PC that does web, email and documents, this is a legitimate answer and costs nothing. It stops being legitimate the moment the user needs a Windows only application, and "we will find an equivalent" is a promise that has ended a lot of migrations badly. Decide by looking at what the person actually opens during a working week.

What we would not recommend is buying more Windows 10 licences for new deployments. The licence is still perfectly valid and it will activate, but you would be starting a new machine on an operating system that receives no security fixes. That is a bad trade at any price.

Windows 11 Home or Pro for a business PC

If you are buying licences anyway, the edition question is worth thirty seconds of thought. Two differences show up immediately in a business setting: BitLocker to Go and Client Hyper-V are both Pro features, not Home ones. Home also requires an internet connection and a Microsoft account simply to finish first time setup, which is awkward on a machine destined for a domain.

For a machine that will ever touch a company network, Pro is the answer, and the price difference is smaller than the first hour you spend working around a limitation.

One lifecycle note worth putting in your calendar now, so this does not happen again: Home, Pro, Pro for Workstations and Pro for Education editions of Windows 11 receive 24 months of support from each version's general availability date. Enterprise and Education get 36. Windows 11 is not a destination, it is a version you keep current.

What to do this month

1. Count the Windows 10 machines you still have. Not the ones on the asset list, the ones answering on the network.
2. Run PC Health Check on each, and check the firmware TPM setting on every machine that reports as ineligible before you write it off.
3. Split the list into three: upgrade now, replace this year, needs a decision.
4. For the third group, set a date, and if you use ESU to reach it, remember that the price doubles each year you delay.

The upgrade itself is the easy part. The inventory is the work.

Related reading

• Windows 11 Pro upgrade: key, licence or full version explains what you are actually buying, and which scenarios need no new licence at all.
• Windows 11 Pro vs Home for business covers the five differences that actually bite in a company, and what each one costs when you get it wrong.