Why it's worth it

If you decide to do nothing

Plenty of people will carry on using Windows 10 as if nothing happened, and that's a legitimate decision you should be able to make with the facts.

What still works, which is more than people say

Your computer isn't going to switch off and no red screen is coming. And several things carry on getting maintenance on their own:

• The Windows antivirus. Microsoft Defender keeps receiving virus definition updates until October 2028. It still recognises new malware.
• The browser. Microsoft Edge has confirmed support on Windows 10 until October 2028. Chrome hasn't committed, but when the same thing happened with Windows 7 it stayed to the end. Firefox carries on too.
• Office. Still works, though since August 2026 it no longer gets new features on Windows 10 — security fixes only.

This matters because it means you aren't naked tomorrow. You have time to do this calmly.

What switched off and isn't coming back

The system itself. Every security hole found in Windows 10 from here on stays open forever. Microsoft ships patches on the second Tuesday of every month; in 2025 it closed more than 1,100 flaws. Not all of them affect Windows 10 and not all are serious, but it gives you a sense of the rate at which holes turn up in a modern operating system.

It happened before, and we know what it looks like. In May 2017 WannaCry was let loose, exploiting a flaw in the protocol Windows uses to share files over a network and spreading on its own, with nobody having to open or click anything. It took down hospitals in the British health service, Renault-Nissan plants and FedEx operations; global damage was put at 4 to 8 billion dollars. The detail worth holding on to: Microsoft had published the patch two months earlier. More than 95% of infected machines were Windows 7 boxes that simply hadn't applied it.

With Windows 10 today the situation is worse in one way and better in another. Worse, because now the patch won't even exist. Better, because you're one person at home, not a hospital with thousands of machines wired to each other.

How likely it is to happen to you

Microsoft reports in its annual security review that more than 90% of ransomware attacks that get as far as encrypting files come in through unmanaged devices — machines with no security controls and nobody watching them. A home computer without patches is exactly that. But the risk isn't spread evenly. It rises sharply if:

• You use that computer for banking or for work.
• It's on a network with other computers (an office, a practice, a business).
• You keep things there you have nowhere else: years of photos, documents, your accounts.
• It's used by someone who opens whatever arrives.

And it drops considerably if it's a desktop at home, for browsing, with everything backed up somewhere else.

Even if nothing bad ever happens, the machine will be left increasingly alone: Nvidia drops full driver support for Windows 10 in October 2026, manufacturers have already started dropping support for their own software, and new devices you buy will arrive without Windows 10 drivers.

The environmental bill

There's one figure almost nobody knows, and it turns everything you assume about recycling gadgets upside down.

81% of it is already spent

When people think about a computer's environmental cost, they think about the electricity it draws. It's the other way round. Life-cycle studies agree with uncomfortable consistency: manufacturing accounts for roughly 81% of a laptop's entire carbon footprint. Use — every year you had it switched on — comes to about 14%. Transport adds 4%, and what happens at the end of its life, less than 1%.

Translated: your computer's environmental damage already happened, in full, before you unboxed it. It was spent pulling lithium, cobalt and rare earths out of a mine, smelting aluminium, making the motherboard and the screen, and shipping it half way round the world. Building a laptop costs between 215 and 400 kg of CO₂ depending on the model; Dell puts one of its typical work machines at 322 kg, HP at around 275.

Which is why «recycle it and buy a new one» sounds right and doesn't add up. Replacing a working computer doesn't save emissions: it pays them again, in full, from zero. Extending the life of the device that already exists is by far the greenest thing you can do with it.

The size of the pile

PIRG estimated that the end of Windows 10 could send up to 1.6 billion pounds of hardware to the dump — some 725,000 tonnes: the largest software-obsolescence event that group has documented since it started counting in 2014. And it lands on a problem that was already growing on its own — the world generated 62 million tonnes of electronic waste in 2022, on track for 82 million by 2030, of which barely 22.3% is collected and recycled in any documented way.

The rest is lost, and with it around 62 billion dollars in materials that could have been recovered. What isn't recovered carries lead, mercury, cadmium and brominated flame retardants, and it gets burned in the open or buried.