Windows 10: Support hasn’t yet ended after all, but Microsoft’s still a fickle-at-best friend

Bowing to user backlash, Microsoft eventually relented and implemented a one-year Windows 10 support-extension scheme. But (limited duration) lifelines are meaningless if they’re DOA.

Back in November, within my yearly “Holiday Shopping Guide for Engineers”, the first suggestion in my list was that you buy you and yours Windows 11-compatible (or alternative O/S-based) computers to replace existing Windows 10-based ones (specifically ones that aren’t officially Windows 11-upgradable, that is). Unsanctioned hacks to alternatively upgrade such devices to Windows 11 do exist, but echoing what I first wrote last June (where I experimented for myself, but only “for science”, mind you), I don’t recommend relying on them for long-term use, even assuming the hardware-hack attempt is successful at all, that is:

The bottom line: any particular system whose specifications aren’t fully encompassed by Microsoft’s Windows 11 requirements documentation is fair game for abrupt no-boot cutoff at any point in the future. At minimum, you’ll end up with a “stuck” system, incapable of being further upgraded to newer Windows 11 releases, therefore doomed to fall off the support list at some point in the future. And if you try to hack around the block, you’ll end up with a system that may no longer reliably function, if it even boots at all.

A mostly compatible computing stable

Fortunately, all of my Windows-based computers are Windows 11-compatible (and already upgraded, in fact), save for two small form factor systems, one (Foxconn’s nT-i2847, along with its companion optical drive), a dedicated-function Windows 7 Media Center server:

(mine are white, and no, the banana’s not normally a part of the stack):

and the other, an XCY X30, largely retired but still hanging around to run software that didn’t functionally survive the Windows 10-to-11 transition:

And as far as I can recall, all of the CPUs, memory DIMMs, SSDs, motherboards, GPUs and other PC building blocks still lying around here waiting to be assembled are Windows 11-compliant, too.

One key exception to the rule

My wife’s laptop, a Dell Inspiron 5570 originally acquired in late 2019, is a different matter:

Dell’s documentation initially indicated that the Inspiron 5570 was a valid Windows 11 upgrade candidate, but the company later backtracked due to partner Microsoft’s increasingly-over-time stingy CPU and TPM requirements. Our secondary strategy was to delay its demise by a year by taking advantage of one of Microsoft’s Windows 10 Extended Support Update (ESU) options. For consumers, there initially were two paths, both paid: spending $30 or redeeming 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, although both ESU options covered up to 10 devices (presumably associated with a common Microsoft account). But in spite of my repeated launching of the Windows Update utility over a several-month span, it stubbornly refused to display the ESU enrollment section necessary to actualize my extension aspirations for the system:

My theory at the time was that although the system was registered under my wife’s personal Microsoft account, she’d also associated it with a Microsoft 365 for Business account for work email and such, and it was therefore getting caught by the more complicated corporate ESU license “net”. So, I bailed on the ESU aspiration and bought her a Dell 16 Plus as a replacement, instead:

That I’d done (and to be precise, seemingly had to do) this became an even more bitter already-swallowed pill when Microsoft subsequently added a third, free consumer ESU option, involving backup of PC settings in prep for the delayed Windows 11 migration to still come a year later:

Belated success, and a “tinfoil hat”-theorized root cause-and-effect

And then the final insult to injury arrived. At the beginning of October, a few weeks prior to the Windows 10 baseline end-of-support date, I again checked Windows Update on a lark…and lo and behold, the long-missing ESU section was finally there (and I then successfully activated it on the Inspiron 5570). Nothing had changed with the system, although I had done a settings backup a few weeks earlier in a then-fruitless attempt to coax the ESU to reactively appear. That said, come to think of it, we also had just activated the new system…were I a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not, but just sayin’), I might conclude that Microsoft had just been waiting to squeeze another Windows license fee out of us (a year earlier than otherwise necessary) first.

To that last point, and in closing, a reality check. At the end of the day, “all” we did was to a) buy a new system a year earlier than I otherwise likely would have done, and b) delay the inevitable transition to that new system by a year. And given how DRAM and SSD prices are trending, delaying the purchase by a year might have resulted in an increased cash outlay, anyway. On the other hand, the CPU would have likely been a more advanced model than we ended up, too. So… Read Original