Microsoft’s new upgrade decision: Bad news confirmed for 70% of Windows users

The nightmare week that hundreds of millions of Microsoft Windows users are going through just got worse. And while some good news had been announced by Microsoft headquarters for these users earlier in the week, that feeling has been muted.

Most of the Windows headlines in recent days have covered the latest Patch Tuesday, which confirmed no fewer than five actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities, all of which were quickly added to the U.S. government’s catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities.

And then, before the ink was even nearly dry on those update warrants, the cyber sleuths at Check Point Research came along, warning that a new variant of the sneaky Phemedrone Stealer had just been upgraded and was actively stealing cryptocurrencies from unpatched Windows PCs. This report was first covered here on Forbes.

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The good news that emerged amid all the gloom came in the form of several headlines hailing Microsoft’s decision to stop pestering Windows 10 users to upgrade to Windows 11 before its end-of-life deadline in October. “Microsoft has quietly confirmed that it has paused its pestering of Windows 11 after user ‘feedback’,” Latest Windows explain.

Windows 10 fans who won’t or can’t upgrade to Windows 11 believe that Microsoft will cave before next October and either extend support or lower the tech bar required for a PC to be compatible with Windows 11. While the Windows 11 user base is just 30% of the total Windows user base, a large number of Microsoft users are still using Windows 10, or worse.

As irritating as the full-screen reminders can be — and they were — the reason so many Windows 10 users are furious is the seemingly unnecessary need to throw away relatively new, working hardware to buy a new PC, just to upgrade to Windows 11. Some of these requirements are performance-related, but mostly it’s about beefing up the PC’s hardware security to help protect the software it runs.

And that’s where the bad news comes in.

Neowin has just confirmed that a well-used and reliable workaround to bypass the Windows 11 technical hurdle has just been shut down by Microsoft. “It’s no secret that few people appreciated the high system requirements Microsoft put forward when it announced Windows 11,” they reported, “so users with unsupported systems have resorted to workarounds to run Windows 11.”

Last year, they and others “covered a very simple workaround that involved a single command when running the Windows 11 installation.” A passthrough that became “popular in the tech community during that time due to media coverage of Neowin and others… Add “/product server” when running the installation and Windows will completely skip the hardware requirements check.

The fact that this workaround lasted for 10 months seemed to suggest that Microsoft wasn’t going to bother closing it, tolerating tricks from savvy users to speed up the move to Windows 11, even if it lowered the hardware security bar.

But that is no longer the case.

The workaround was just closed in the latest development update; it hasn’t been fully released yet, but as Neowin explains: “The trick should still work on a final version of Windows 11… however, as the Canary patch progresses through the pipeline, don’t expect it to be around for long.”

In itself, this isn’t a fundamental change, but rather a coded workaround. But it’s important because it suggests that Microsoft is maintaining, or even strengthening, its position in hardware, despite user annoyance and the low number of upgrades.

With just over a year left until Windows 10’s security support ends, no expensive security extensions for businesses or home users, and vulnerability after vulnerability, this is a huge looming problem.

A reading of the comments of Forbes readers when the Windows 11 upgrade timeline is covered are typical of what is said on several online forums.

“If Microsoft wanted people to migrate from Windows 10 to Windows 11, they should have made Windows 11 compatible with the large percentage of hardware currently running Windows 10 and not forced tens of millions of people to buy new computers,” one reader commented. “Most people aren’t ready to do that, and now Microsoft wants to use scare tactics to force people to buy new hardware.”

Another noted that “Microsoft is ignoring the fact that many users are running businesses on legacy hardware that they will never be able to upgrade to Windows 11. ‘Just buy a new computer!’ is not an option when the existing computer is connected to business-critical equipment.”

And the direct messages I get say the same thing: “It’s not just the cost and hassle of upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11,” one user told me. “It’s the cost of a new computer. Many Americans can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on new computers just to please Microsoft. You can see that in the adoption rate of only 30%. My replacement cost was $1,200.”

While Windows 11 adoption is growing, it’s been painfully slow. The number of Windows 10 users is still twice as high, and a significant proportion of them will be using PCs that don’t make the switch. Cost aside, the waste of those many discarded PCs is staggering. “Ceasing support for Windows 10,” Canalys warns, “could deny hundreds of millions of devices a second life, leaving many of them likely to end up in landfills.” The lack of a second-hand market for these aging devices also means that it’s costing a lot of people who usually buy older machines.

Canalys has gathered some statistics to illustrate just how scary this prospect could be: “About a fifth of devices will become e-waste due to incompatibility with the Windows 11 operating system. That’s equivalent to 240 million PCs. If it were just folded laptops, stacked on top of each other, they would form a pile 600 km higher than the moon.”

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So even if Microsoft closes a backdoor to Windows 11 hardware compatibility, it doesn’t directly If Windows 10 impacts hundreds of millions of PC users, its end of life will be inevitable. And if a significant percentage of users can’t afford the upgrade or refuse to throw away what they consider to be perfectly functional machines, a massive IT challenge looms on the horizon.

The Windows 10 deadline is just over a year away; Microsoft’s new workaround seems to be a confirmation of its intent, maintaining its firm stance that Windows 11 hardware is confirmed – at least for now. All of this is bad news for the 70% of all Windows users who are waiting for October 2025.