Windows 10 extended updates
Yesterday –14th August 2025 – was the day support for Windows 10 officially ended. No updates means that your system might be vunerable for being hacked some time in the future if it is on the internet.
Microsoft will let you extend this for 1 year for a fee of $30 or might let you do so for free if you are backing up your computer to a Microsoft account. The latter might be a problem if you have a lot of data being backed up as you only get 5GB of space and if backing up pictures etc it might take up a lot more than this and you would need to pay for space.
I do use an MS account on my PCs and I have One drive running. but I turn off certain folders – like desktop, documents and pictures. This means my backup is quite small so I did not know what would happen if I tried to enroll for extended backups.
I tried it anyway and got the extended support for free which means I can use my old Windows 10 machine for another year without worry. I have several old machines so I tried to do this on all of them and after I had done two it said I could not do another.
So if you are using a Windows 10 PC I would recommend giving this a go. Log in with a Microft account, make sure one drive is running and turn off backup on the larger folders, then try to enrol and see what happens.
The enroll proceedure
I get this screen – I have not seen what happens if you do not have a Microsoft account or if you have only just signed in with one or have not set up back up properly.
It clearly says “no extra cost” here for me. Click add device
Problems?
MS said they would let people who were backing up their PCS get free updates a couple of months ago. It is possible they will only let people do this who signed in with a Microsoft account before 14th October or people that had enabled backup before 14th. I do not know will happen if you sign in now as I have been using an MS account on my PCs for years.
If it asks you to pay I would suggest you don’t enroll, try signing in with an MS account and also fiddle with the One Drive settings and see whether it lets you get free updates after this.
If you would like me to do try doing this by remote control get in touch – david@dvctraining.co.uk – and I can have a go at my usual support rates.