Ahead of Microsoft’s big announcement about the ‘next generation of Windows’ (just 10 days from today) the OS maker has issued an important support notice for Windows 10 users. Microsoft’s Product Lifecycle pages have been updated to clearly signal the retirement date for Windows 10 Home, Pro, Pro Education, Pro for Workstations. Chiseled into the gravestone, by the ghost of Windows yet to come, we see that support for Windows 10 is destined to cease on 14th October 2025. The date is over four years from now, which is lucky, as we don’t even know the name of its replacement as yet.
Microsoft has been quite busy teasing the ‘next generation of Windows’, ever since Build 2021 where that reference for the upcoming OS was first made. Until that time, we just thought we would be seeing yet another update to Windows 10, but with some more significant changes than usual.
Previously the livestream invite gave rise to Windows 11 naming rumours, and last week that was followed up by more teasing that what we would see unveiled on Thursday 24th June, would in fact be branded as Windows 11.
The new EOL notice for Windows 10 makes it even clearer we will have a renamed OS, to go with the Sun Valley visual overhaul, with Windows 10X attention to diverse form factors folded in, and sprinklings of features that haven’t leaked out yet. Nothing has leaked so far about hardware requirements, distribution, and the pricing model for the next Windows – all these will be important to its adoption in the coming years.
Game Pass issues get out of band fix
In other Windows news, Microsoft has released an optional out-of-band update for Windows 10 2004, 20H2, and 21H1. This fix comes due to reported issues with Xbox Game Pass users being redirected to the Microsoft Store’s Gaming Services page when trying to open or install a title included in Game Pass.
If you have faced such issues on your PC, you can prod Windows Update to look for this patch. If you don’t look for the update at this time, it is going to be folded into the mandatory set of patches distributed next Patch Tuesday.