How to get another free year of updates for your Windows 10 PC

Buying Windows 10 a one-year stay of execution doesn't have to cost anything.

Officially, Microsoft will stop providing new security updates for Windows 10 PCs after October 14, 2025, a little over a decade after its initial release. It's a stick that Microsoft is using to push upgrades to the newer Windows 11, whether you install it on a PC you already have or buy a brand-new PC to meet Windows 11's system requirements.

But if you can't or don't want to upgrade to Windows 11, Microsoft has made it reasonably simple to get an extra year of Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for Windows 10, extending its official support window to October of 2026. But this won't happen automatically; users will need to enroll their PCs in the ESU program to get the updates, using an enrollment feature that Microsoft just released to Windows 10 PCs recently.