Windows 11 End of Support: Which Machines Upgrade and Which Are End-of-Life

Windows 11 end of support arrives in October 2027 — that's when version 25H2, the feature update many machines are running right now, stops receiving security updates. And if that sounds distant, note that 24H2 already fell off support last month, in October 2026. Windows 11 itself isn't dying; individual versions are falling off the support ladder, and whether your PC can step onto the next rung depends entirely on its hardware. Here's the line, and which side of it your machine sits on.

What actually ends in October 2027

Windows 11 Home and Pro feature updates get 24 months of support from release. Each version rolls forward — you install the next one, the clock resets. But that only works if the machine accepts the new version, and that's where the hardware requirements bite.

25H2 was released in autumn 2025, so its window closes in October 2027. Machines that haven't kept up with feature updates will be stuck on it — and after that date, no more security patches. The machine keeps working, it doesn't switch off, but every vulnerability discovered after that point goes unpatched on your desk. If you're still on 24H2, you're already in that position as of last month.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It's exactly the position Windows 10 machines hit in October 2025, when Windows 10 lost security updates unless covered by Extended Security Updates — paid for businesses, with limited free routes for home users. Plenty of Portsmouth businesses are already living that. Windows 11's date is the second wave.

One thing to be clear on, because the headlines are sloppy: "Windows 11 end of support" almost always means a specific version ending, not the OS family. Windows 11 continues. Versions roll forward — but only if your hardware qualifies. And that's the real story.

And if your Windows 11 machine feels sluggish, don't assume it's the OS — Microsoft has finally added a way to turn AI answers off in Bing, though as we found, that rarely fixes the real cause of a slow laptop.

And even fully patched machines aren't immune — the 4EverAble2Shell zero-day we covered this month caught 19 of 21 victims running the latest updates, which is why patching is necessary but not the whole story.

The hardware line: can your machine upgrade at all?

Windows 11 requires three things:

• TPM 2.0 (a security chip, or firmware equivalent)
• UEFI Secure Boot enabled
• A supported CPU — broadly Intel 8th generation (Coffee Lake, 2017) or newer, or AMD Ryzen 2000 series or newer

In practice: most PCs bought from about 2018 onwards qualify. Most from 2016–2017 don't — 7th-gen Intel (Kaby Lake) and 1st-gen Ryzen machines fail the CPU check, even though many of them are still perfectly quick for email, browsing and Office. That's the frustrating part: the hardware isn't slow, it's just not on the list.

In the workshop, the blockers we see most often fall into three camps:

1. No TPM 2.0, or it's disabled in BIOS. This is the good one — plenty of machines have a firmware TPM that's simply switched off. Enabling it is a quick, cheap job.
2. Legacy BIOS / MBR installation. The machine was set up in old-school BIOS mode with an MBR-formatted drive instead of UEFI with GPT. Fixable, but the conversion is the fiddly bit.
3. Unsupported CPU. This is the hard stop. If the processor isn't on Microsoft's list, the machine is effectively end-of-life for Windows 11 — there's no setting to change.

The practical split: a machine that fails only on TPM or Secure Boot can usually be made compliant without much workshop time. A machine with an unsupported CPU can't, at any price.

You can run Microsoft's basic compatibility check yourself — but the edge cases are where it goes wrong. A "this PC can't run Windows 11" message is often just a disabled TPM, and one wrong BIOS change can stop a machine booting entirely. That's why we check all of this as part of a standard assessment rather than talking people through it over the phone: it's the difference between retiring a machine that had a year of cheap fixes left in it.

One extra check if you're keeping the machine and just fitting an SSD: if it has an AMD Radeon card, the recent driver bug that wrote to the SSD in the background may have already worn your old drive — here's how to tell how much life it lost.

And if your machine does qualify, don't forget the memory — many 2018-era PCs shipped with 8GB, so it's worth checking how much a laptop RAM upgrade costs and whether yours has a slot to upgrade at all before you commit to the Windows 11 jump.

Machines that qualify but struggle: the upgrade-vs-replace call

Then there's the grey zone: hardware that technically runs Windows 11 but runs it badly.

The classic case is an 8th-gen Core i5 from 2018 with a spinning hard drive. It passes every check, installs Windows 11 happily, and then takes four minutes to boot and stutters every time you open a browser. The OS isn't the problem — the drive is. Windows 11 on a mechanical hard drive is a genuinely miserable experience.

The single biggest win is an SSD swap. Combined with a RAM bump to 16GB, a 2018–2020 machine typically feels new again — for a fraction of what a replacement business desktop costs. We quote per machine, but an SSD-plus-RAM refresh almost always lands well under the price of a new box, and it's the difference between "qualifies" and "actually usable".

There's a principle here we keep coming back to: an upgrade is only as viable as the rest of the machine allows. When we looked at the RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti, the PSU decided whether the upgrade made sense. Here, the TPM and CPU decide. Same rule, different part.

If your machine is in this grey zone, our SSD upgrade and RAM upgrade pages cover what's involved and what it costs.

Machines that are now end-of-life: what to do with them

If the CPU isn't on the list, you have three options, in order of cost:

• Keep it on the last supported version, offline or for non-sensitive tasks. Fine for a machine running a label printer in a back room. Risky for anything holding customer data or connected to your network.
• Move it to a lightweight Linux. Viable for some home users — browsing and email work fine. Not viable for most businesses tied to Windows-only software like Sage or industry-specific packages.
• Replace it. The honest answer for business machines.

For a small business, an unpatched Windows machine on the network is a quiet liability: the software keeps working, which is exactly why nobody notices it — until it's the machine that let an attacker in. We made the same argument about servers in our post on checking SSH vulnerabilities: end-of-life software is dangerous precisely because it keeps working. The same logic applies to the desktop in the office.

Two things before the old machine goes anywhere:

• The data doesn't die with it. We can clone or recover everything from the old drive first — see our data recovery and backup service.
• Replacement doesn't have to mean a big-brand box. For office use, a modest custom build or a refurbished qualifying machine covers most small-business needs at a sensible price.

A rough timeline for Portsmouth businesses

Work back from October 2027 and this becomes a plan rather than a panic:

1. Now to mid-2027: audit the fleet. Which machines qualify, which need TPM enabling, which are end-of-life. This is a spreadsheet job, not a guesswork job.
2. Mid-2027 to autumn 2027: upgrade or replace the non-compliant machines — well before the deadline crunch.
3. After October 2027: any machine still on 25H2 is a security liability. Plan for it to come off the network entirely.

And learn the Windows 10 lesson: in our experience, the businesses that left it to the last month in 2025 paid more and waited longer — for machines, for parts, for workshop time. The ones who booked early got sorted calmly. Book early.

What it costs: the honest price ladder

• Tier 1 — cheap: TPM/Secure Boot enablement plus a Windows 11 feature-update install on a qualifying machine. Our Windows OS installation service handles the whole job.
• Tier 2 — still cheap: SSD and/or RAM upgrade to make a qualifying machine genuinely usable on Windows 11. Usually the best money you'll spend.
• Tier 3 — replacement: new business desktop or laptop, or a custom build. Quoted per spec.

Students and NHS staff get our fixed-fee discount, and collection and delivery across Portsmouth is £10 each way — or drop the machine off at the workshop yourself.

Bring the fleet to us

The audit is the service. We'll collect your machines, go through every one in the workshop, sort them into upgrade / fix / replace, and return them with a quote for each — no guesswork, no surprises in autumn 2027.

From there, hand the whole migration over: upgrades, reinstalls, data transfer, and disposal of the old kit. Collection and delivery across Portsmouth and the surrounding area is £10 each way, and Fast Track is there if there's a machine the business can't be without for a day.

Ring us on 02392 733174 or book a repair and we'll start with the machine in front of you.

Questions people ask