OS PLATFORMS

Tiny tweak to support page reveals consumers can purchase another year of patch protection

Microsoft has oh-so-quietly extended its offer of extended security updates for consumer users of Windows 10.

The Windows giant ended support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, when it stopped shipping fixes and updates – unless users coughed up for an extended patch package.

Redmond’s offer for business users includes an option for an extra three years of support, albeit with ratcheting costs that demonstrate Microsoft has an enormous preference for customers to adopt Windows 11. Consumer users of Windows 10 could acquire an extra year of patches any time up to October 13, 2026.

In the last couple of days, Microsoft’s page explaining extended security support changed to mention users can sign up until October 12, 2027.

Microsoft hasn’t explained why it’s extended the offer but it’s not hard to guess why: millions of users continue to use the OS – HP says 30 percent of its customers haven’t moved. StatCounter found that 26 percent of all Windows users it can see online continue to use Windows 10.

The global population of active Windows boxes exceeds one billion, so hundreds of millions of PCs running Windows 10 remain in service.

Microsoft has already committed to providing business customers with patches until 2028, so isn’t giving itself a massive amount of extra work by extending support for ordinary punters.

Redmond will charge $30 for a year of extra patches, a far smaller sum than the price of the new PC that many users will need to get decent performance out of Windows 11 – or to run it at all given the newer OS requires TPM 2.0 and at least 4GB of RAM plus 64GB of storage.

PC prices are also on the rise thanks to the AI boom meaning deep-pocketed hyperscalers are paying a premium for memory and solid-state storage devices. No tech manufacturer is immune: Apple has hiked Mac and iPad prices to cover the rising cost of RAM.

Microsoft knows that’s a problem for the PC market because it recently said its developers are “lowering the baseline memory footprint for Windows.” That effort hasn’t yet delivered a change to Microsoft’s requirement for PCs running Windows 11 to employ 4GB of memory – or 16GB on AI PCs.

Keeping Windows 10 secure for a little while longer might earn Microsoft some grudging appreciation – and a few bucks it might not be able to access from fresh Windows 11 license sales at a time punters are keeping their wallets shut. ®