Take a look at the bottom of your computer screen. If there’s a “dock” down there that wobbles when you mouse over it, you’re on a Macintosh and what follows is not your problem, so well done there. If there’s a pretty-coloured Windows button toward the middle of the task bar, you’re on Windows 11 and you’re also safe, for now at least. But if the Windows button is over on the left, and if it’s plain black or white with no groovy colour textures to it, then the pathologist’s report is in: I’m afraid you have a case of Windows 10, and it’s terminal.
Windows 10 has been around for ten years now, and it’s showing its age, even though plenty of people still like it. Microsoft doesn’t like it though, and they’re making sure you know that. Come October of this year, they are stopping all free support, and anyone who still uses it has a choice of three, maybe four, options.
Why That Even Matters
But hold on – why is that a problem? You’ve never called Microsoft themselves for support, have you? Why does it matter that they’re stopping?
It all boils down to hackers.
In the parts of the world with poor cyber-security rules, hell-holes like North Korea, Iran and Florida, there is a thriving community of the criminals that the newspapers love to call hackers. They exploit security holes in computer systems to break in and either steal data or else remote-control those systems to make them do their dirty work. Even if you don’t have any interesting data and your bank balance is tiny, your computer could still be taken over and made part of a “bot net”, a network of computers controlled by the bad guys, all without your knowledge.
The traditional way you avoid this has been to let your computer update its security regularly. The process goes something like this: first, a hacker finds a security flaw in a system, something they can exploit to gain control. They very quickly write programs that use these flaws, and send them out into the world. They have to be quick, because Microsoft and various security researchers are hot on their tail, and a typical exploit is patched and made unhackable in just a few days or weeks. In generally, a properly-updated computer system is very unlikely to be reached by hackers before its flaws are fixed.
This all changes, of course, if Microsoft is no longer patching the hacks, which will be the case from October 2025 for Windows 10, as it already is for Windows 7 and XP and all the older versions. Smart hackers have probably already started stockpiling their exploits, keeping them quiet instead of rushing them out into the world, knowing that if they can hold onto them until October they’ll have free rein to do as they wish.
The practical effect of all this is obvious: if you’re still using Windows 10 to connect to the internet after October of this year, your computer and all your data no longer belong to you. That’s bad.
So let’s consider the options.
Option Zero: Pay For Support
I said “stopping all free support”, right? For a fee, you can still get support for Windows 10, which means security patches for the next time the bad guys find a hole in the security of the operating system. That will set you back thirty US dollars and will only postpone the problem, not solve it. If you can find a way to even pay for it — Microsoft hate this option and are hiding it from view as much as they can — then you can do this, and you give yourself a little more breathing room. But don’t be fooled: all you’re buying is time to make a decision, and the decision remains.
Option One: Windows 11
Upgrading to Windows 11 would seem to be the obvious choice, right? Sure — if it’s possible. A lot of computers simply lack the hardware features to enable an upgrade, thanks to a requirement Microsoft has added called a TPM chip. Without going into detail, the TPM chip enables certain improvements to security that are way more important to Microsoft than they are to the rest of us, but they’re not budging on that requirement so there we go. If you have the option to just install Windows 11 on your existing hardware, you should do that before October and you’ll be fine. If you can’t do that, your only way to run Windows as before is to chuck out your computer and buy a new one. If you hate the waste and cost that entails, read on.
Option Two: Hide From The World
Presuming you have a Windows 10 computer that you can’t upgrade and won’t chuck out, you can still use it, without any worry. There’s just one catch: you can’t connect to the internet any more. Use it as an appliance to store and arrange your photos, play DVDs if it’s old enough to have a DVD drive, or play your stand-alone, un-networked games. You can use it like that without risk for as long as it keeps booting up, which could be years.
No internet means no internet. No email, no websites, no online games. If a computer with unpatched security flaws is connected to a network, it can be exploited and nothing on there is safe. You might think “I don’t have any data the hackers want” and you may be right, especially if you’ve never signed in to a bank account or entered any of your financial data anywhere, but you could still be contributing to a bot net, allowing your computer to be a tool the hackers use to exploit other computers. Given the poor quality of the computer programming in these things, there’s a good chance that this will wreck your machine by accident, which is why I still don’t recommend it even if you don’t care about other people’s computers.
I presume that turning your computer into little more than a DVD player is not your idea of a good time, so again, read on for the final possibility.
Option Three: An Operating System That Isn’t Windows
Windows is not the only choice for a modern, friendly computer system. There’s the Mac operating system on Apple devices, sure, though that requires new hardware so it’s just an alternative version of option one. But if you can’t install Windows 11 but want to continue to use your computer to connect to the internet, you can choose an operating system that was invented to be a free, fully functional alternative: Linux.
Linux looks and feels like a slightly strange combination of Mac and Windows, with a twist. In the standard installation of the most popular version, for example, the bottom task bar is replaced by a dock, like on the Mac, but it sits on the left of the screen instead of the bottom. This actually makes a lot of sense on modern, wide screens, especially laptops, which never have enough vertical space. Windows and menus and buttons all work the way you expect, but nearly every program you might need, from notepads to calculators to full office suites and web browsers and email, is available in a searchable library of downloadable applications, like the Windows Store or the Google and Apple app stores, but free.
Freedom is a central philosophy. Software developers speak of two types: free as in speech, meaning free from restriction, and free as in beer, meaning it costs no money (if you can even find free beer anywhere – good luck!). Linux is both: you can download it, use it as you wish, and even modify its inner workings if you know how. Windows and Mac OS are not free in that sense, because they are owned by companies, Microsoft and Apple, who guard their technology closely. Linux is owned by a worldwide community of programmers, and that makes a difference.
The major result of this freedom is that there are a lot of different versions of Linux, all grown out of the original one developed by a Finnish software engineer named Linus Torvalds. (The system is named after him, which is why it’s correctly pronounced “LINN-ux”, not “LINE-ux”, because his name is pronounced “LINN-us”, in the Finnish fashion.) The version I usually recommend is called Ubuntu, and it can be downloaded and installed from an official website that provides versions for all sorts of situations. For what you want, as a replacement for Windows, the desktop version is your best choice.
I won’t go into detail here about the differences, other than to note that if you want a web browser, both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox work exactly the same in Linux as they do in Windows. If you need an office suite with Word, Excel and Powerpoint, the free OpenOffice suite reads and writes Microsoft Office files and works the same way, minus all the recent Artificial Intelligence rubbish. And for email, Outlook can be replaced in Linux as it can in Windows, by Mozilla Thunderbird, a considerably more versatile system with much better search functionality. And, of course, Steam Games exists in Linux as it does in Windows, although it can lag a bit in providing the newest versions. But then – if you need the newest version of a game, you’re probably running a new computer, so upgrading to Windows 11 was never a problem for you.
If you want to talk about your options, whether upgrading to Linux or trying one of the other choices, please give me a call on 6297 9959 or text on 0407 468 244, and I’ll be happy to hear your story and suggest a personalised solution. The end of Windows 10 is coming, but it doesn’t have to be the end for your computer.