With Windows 10 End of Life only ten months away, Microsoft is stepping up its campaign to get Windows users to upgrade to Windows 11. But while Windows 11 had been gaining users at a steady rate at the expense of Windows 10 there's been a sudden reversal of the trend, as revealed by StatCounter.

Have you seen this Microsoft splash screen? If you are desktop Windows user not already on Windows 11 you're likely to be seeing it with increasing frequency.

The good news it conveys is that if you are running Windows 10 you can upgrade to Windows 11 on the same hardware for free. The catch is that the hardware has to meet minimum requirements - and most Windows users work perfectly happily with kit that is nowhere near this spec.

I use my PC for both work and fun and its copes well enough but falls well short of Windows 11 standard. The real killer is that it doesn't use a supported CPU and the other bar to upgrading the OS is that its uses TPM 1.2 rather than TPM 2.0. As Mike James explained in Windows 11 The Lockdown, TPM 2 coupled with Windows 11's other security features makes the a desktop machine you consider personal a status similar to that of a carrier and vendor-locked mobile phone. To exacerbate this, Microsoft  also insists on users having a Microsoft account another big deterrent to upgrading for many people.

Lack of official support seems to phase Windows users less and less as time goes on. Six months after Windows XP reached end of life it accounted for around 15% of the Windows Desktop usage and was in steady decline It took 18 months after end of support for Windows 7's share to decline to 15% and the usage stayed at around 10% until the beginning of 2023, since when it has declined to around 2.5%. 

In terms of desktop market share, Windows 7 outstripped Windows XP some two and a half years before XP's end of life, and Windows 10 overtook Windows 7 two years before 7's end of life, we are now less than a year away from Windows 10's end of life and it still way ahead of Windows 11 in terms of market share. Even if the trend for 10 to decline and 11 to increase, the Stacounter chart suggests that they would be at level pegging by October 2025. So the recent reversal in the trend raises the question of whether Windows 10 still be the dominant operating system when it is no longer supported.

In view of this possibility, Microsoft announced an Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. For a fee of $30 users of Windows 10 Home or Pro can remain supported with security updates for an additional 12 months after the official end of support date on October 14, 2025. 

More Information

End of support for Windows 10

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