Windows 11

Today is the official end-of-support date for Microsoft’s Windows 10. That doesn’t mean these PCs will suddenly stop working, but if you don’t take action, it does mean your PC has received its last regular security patches and that Microsoft is washing its hands of technical support.

This end-of-support date comes about a decade after the initial release of Windows 10, which is typical for most Windows versions. But it comes just four years after Windows 10 was replaced by Windows 11, a version with stricter system requirements that left many older-but-still-functional PCs with no officially supported upgrade path. As a result, Windows 10 still runs on roughly 40 percent of the world’s Windows PCs (or around a third of US-based PCs), according to StatCounter data.

But this end-of-support date also isn’t set in stone. Home users with Windows 10 PCs can enroll in Microsoft’s Extended Security Updates (ESU) program, which extends the support timeline by another year. We’ve published directions for how to do this here—while you do need one of the Microsoft accounts that the company is always pushing, it’s relatively trivial to enroll in the ESU program for free.

Home users can only get a one-year stay of execution for Windows 10, but IT administrators and other institutions with fleets of Windows 10 PCs can also pay for up to three years of ESUs, which is also roughly the amount of time users can expect new Microsoft Defender antivirus updates and updates for core apps like Microsoft Edge.

Obviously, Microsoft’s preferred upgrade path would be either an upgrade to Windows 11 for PCs that meet the requirements or an upgrade to a new PC that does support Windows 11. It’s also still possible, at least for now, to install and run Windows 11 on unsupported PCs. Your day-to-day experience will generally be pretty good, though installing Microsoft’s major yearly updates (like the upcoming Windows 11 25H2 update) can be a bit of a pain. For new Windows 11 users, we’ll publish an update to our Windows 11 cleanup guide soon—these steps help to minimize the upsells and annoyances that Microsoft has baked into its latest OS.

Of the many minor to medium-size annoyances that come with a modern Windows 11 installation, the requirement that you sign in with a Microsoft account is one of the most irritating. Sure, all operating systems (including Apple’s and Google’s) encourage account sign-in as part of their setup process and prevent you from using multiple operating system features until and unless you sign in.

Various sanctioned and unsanctioned tools and workarounds existed to allow users to set their PCs up with old-fashioned local accounts, and those workarounds haven’t changed much in the last three years. But Microsoft is working on tightening the screws in preview builds of Windows, foreshadowing some future version of Windows where getting around the account requirement is even harder than it already is.

In a new update released to the Dev channel of the Windows Insider Preview program yesterday (build number 26220.6772), Microsoft announced it was “removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE).” Microsoft says that these workarounds “inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.”

The removed commands include the “OOBEBYPASSNRO” workaround that Microsoft announced it was removing earlier this year, plus a “start ms-cxh:localonly” workaround that had been documented more recently. In current Windows releases, users can open a command prompt window during setup with Shift+F10 and input either of those commands to remove both the Microsoft account requirement and Internet connection requirement.

Windows 11 Pro currently includes another workaround, where you can indicate that you plan to join your computer to a corporate domain and use that to create a local account. We don’t know whether this mechanism has also been removed from the new Windows build.

It’s unclear what “critical setup screens” Microsoft is referring to; when using the workarounds to create a local account, the Windows setup assistant still shows you all the screens you need for creating an account and a password, plus toggling a few basic privacy settings. Signing in with a Microsoft account does add multiple screens to this process though—these screens will attempt to sell you Microsoft 365 and Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, and to opt you into features like the data-scraping Windows Recall on PCs that support it. I would not describe any of these as “critical” from a user’s perspective, but my priorities are not Microsoft’s priorities.

Microsoft’s fifth major iteration of Windows 11 is nearing its release to the general public—the Windows Insider team announced today that Windows 11 25H2 was being put into its Release Preview Channel, the final stop for most updates before they become available to everyone. That’s around two months after the first Windows builds with the 25H2 label were released to the other preview channels.

Putting a new yearly Windows update in the Release Preview channel is analogous to the “release to manufacturing” (RTM) phase of years past, back when updates shipped on physical media that needed to be manufactured. Build numbers for this version of Windows start with 26200, rather than 24H2’s 26100.

The 25H2 update doesn’t do a lot in and of itself, other than reset the clock for Microsoft’s security updates (each yearly release gets two years of security patches). Microsoft says that last year’s 24H2 update and this year’s 25H2 update “use a shared servicing branch,” which mostly means that there aren’t big under-the-hood differences between the two. Installing the 25H2 update on a PC may enable some features on your 24H2 PC that had already been installed but had been disabled by default.

Microsoft says that installing the 25H2 update removes PowerShell 2.0 and the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line tool (both previously deprecated), and that it allows IT administrators to automatically remove some preinstalled Windows apps from the Microsoft Store via Group Policy. But Microsoft hasn’t said much about major, user-facing new features that are unique to the 25H2 update. The 23H2 update from two years ago was a similarly quiet add-on for Windows 11 22H2.