On October 14, Microsoft ended security support for Windows 10. I’ve known this was coming for ages, but kept telling myself I had plenty of time to think about what to do about it. The decision I made was to… do nothing except occasionally get kinda pissed about it, and now that the moment is here, it seems like I’m going to do nothing but get pissed about it.
My anger at this transition up to this point had mostly been personal. I built (“built”) my PC, and while its hardware is Windows 11 compatible, there are a couple things I have to screw with to set up secure boot and enable TPM 2.0. I have only the vaguest grasp of what these are, but I’m 80% sure I can enable them in my BIOS, a place I have rarely visited. I watched some YouTube videos about all this and it seems achievable, I just haven’t worked up the courage or found the dedicated time to venture unsupervised into my PC’s guts.
I have also not worked up the motivation to do all this just to end up with Windows 11, an AI-laden system that I have zero desire for. AI has already forced its way into my daily software like Google suite and Quickbooks, both of which also rolled out obligatory price increases with the addition. I’ve subjected my Aftermath colleagues to multiple furious rants about this: I don’t want AI fucking around in my emails and balance sheets; I certainly don’t want to become a statistic in Gemini or Copilot’s user numbers. The Verge today quoted Microsoft executive VP and marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi in saying the company’s vision is to “rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.” Do you want this? I sure as shit don’t want this, and I especially don’t want to be strong-armed into it so Microsoft can fudge the numbers on its AI products’ popularity.
There’s also BDS’ Microsoft boycott, which includes the company’s operating system. I’ll be honest that this is a tough one for me: I have no love for Microsoft and Windows as a concept, but the alternative is open source OSes that you can probably tell from this blog are a bit above my pay grade. Windows is the platform that works the best, or at least the most straightforwardly, for the gaming I use my PC for, for fun but also for work. I’ve gone back and forth with myself between “I need this to do my job” and the fact that, however intimidating it might feel, learning Linux is a meaningless inconvenience compared to doing the right thing to actively face my own complicity in Israel’s war crimes.
All of these factors have contributed to my procrastination, now become a decision point. I learned this week that I can extend Windows’ security support for another year, either for free if I can remember my Microsoft account login and be willing to engage with OneDrive, or for a fee (haha, no).
But here’s where my thinking turned. As 404 pointed out yesterday, this extended support offer suggests “it would be trivial for [Microsoft] to continue to offer critical security updates for free.” As I grumbled over this change for a year, I usually figured there must be some good reason for all this. After all, I’ve had to upgrade Windows OSes in the past; while I don’t remember any of them being this onerous, I also hadn’t built my own PC for any of them. But realizing the company could keep offering support, it just doesn’t want to, started to make me realize that maybe this is all bullshit.
404 goes on:
Microsoft’s decision to sunset Windows 10 support is particularly concerning considering that more than 42 percent of all Windows users are currently using Windows 10. When Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 8, just 3.7 percent of computers were using it, and just 2.2 percent of Windows users were using Windows 8.1 when Microsoft stopped supporting that operating system.
“More than 40 percent of Windows users still use it,” [PIRG campaign director Nathan] Proctor said. “So to cut support for something that is legitimately a flagship product is bizarre. No one expects Microsoft to do software updates forever, but when 43 percent of your customers are using it, it’s not obsolete.”
Seeing the numbers laid out like this really hit me: since I’m surrounded by very techy people, I figured my foot-dragging on upgrading was just me being an 18th century Shaker trapped in the body of a 21st century games journalist. But plenty of people besides me are still happily ("happily") using Windows 10–especially, as 404 points out, schools and other institutions that are now over a barrel if they own machines that aren’t compatible with Windows 11–making this forced change utterly arbitrary and needlessly severe. 404 and others have pointed out the immense amount of e-waste this all stands to create; putting this on schools and government institutions at a time when both are under attack seems like it stands to do nothing but further degrade essential services. And that’s to say nothing of all the individuals who might find themselves feeling squeezed to buy a new computer at a time when money is tighter than ever.
There’s no reason for any of this to be happening the way it is beyond forced obsolescence and for Microsoft to flaunt its useless AI products and pump its bottom line. New OSes happen, but this whole rollout doesn’t need to be going the way it’s going. I’ll admit to finding something grimly comforting in seeing what I thought was just my own inadequacy at computers despite working with them as having at least some systemic roots I can rail at instead of feeling bad about myself. There’s even something inspiring, if not a bit exhausting, in learning there are always new things I can get motivated to fight back against. I'm full of piss and vinegar! I'm alive!
But, like so many things in our lives these days, realizing it’s all bullshit doesn’t get you out of the bullshit, as our billionaires and tech overlords go full masks off about how much they just don’t care about the average person and their needs. 404 points to a petition for Microsoft to extend Windows 10 support, even while noting it's a long shot. As ever, this whole thing mostly inspires me to want to abandon all my electronics on a street corner and start riding my bike to Alaska; while it would be a lot harder than learning Linux, at least it would be a lot more fun.
