Microsoft Offers $30 Windows 10 Security Extension for Home Users

[SOAREVERSOR]

10 years is a long enough time in software lifecyle, though I am sure some here do think that Microsoft should keep supporting older Windows versions forever.
P.S.
Those 10 USD keys of yours... None of them are legal.

You act like PC gamers give one rats ass about legality. It's a community known for rampant theft.

 

[windwhirl]

Are you kidding me, the whole windows system iso costs 10/15 bucks for ever before that bullshit or maybe you are living in another dimension

Where in the hell do you think 10/15 bucks is the "normal" price? The normal price is like 180/260 dollars (home/pro version, at least in my region).

And then there's the pricing for OEMs (your prebuilt PC and laptop makers, such as Lenovo, Dell, etc.) which varies but last I heard it was anywhere from like 45 dollars for the Home version on low-spec devices to somewhere around a 100 dollars for higher spec devices.

The 10/15 bucks are for keys bought in markets selling Enterprise keys most of the time. Which Microsoft didn't authorize reselling of (not that they will necessary witch-hunt people for doing so, rather they'll disable the keys or go after the companies that broke contract).

You act like PC gamers give one rats ass about legality. It's a community known for rampant theft.

They don't. Doesn't mean that your 10/15 dollar key is the normal.

PS: The "normal" is straight up 0 dollars outside of a few countries

 

[Sabishii Hito]

Education gets three years for 1 dollar each user each year, seemingly. So quite cheap and mostly symbolic.

Hospitals and institutions should be on business-like contracts so each case might be different and can't really be dumbed down to "oh Micro$oft is bleeding everyone dry"


State governments should be on business like contracts as well and they should have budgeted their goddamn systems upgrades as well.

Also, intervention? The only government that could intervene is the US one, and it would be seen as the government getting into things they shouldn't so it will never happen.

Clearly, you've never worked for any government agency in the USA. Budgeting for IT is an afterthought and/or they look to slash it so far it causes issues, then higher ups want to know what the problem is.

 

[mechtech]

Someone inside MS seen an opportunity for another subscription

 

[lemonadesoda]

This is the beginning of rent-a-windows

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

10 years is a long enough time in software lifecyle, though I am sure some here do think that Microsoft should keep supporting older Windows versions forever.
P.S.
Those 10 USD keys of yours... None of them are legal.

Why should it be made obsolete? It's not very environmental of them, there's plenty of PCs that MS will not allow to run 11 because reasons, but run 10 just fine. Forcing those machines to retirement is not good at all.

There's no technical reason they *need* to stop at 10 years. 10 and 11 are shockingly similar under the hood.

Where in the hell do you think 10/15 bucks is the "normal" price? The normal price is like 180/260 dollars (home/pro version, at least in my region).

And then there's the pricing for OEMs (your prebuilt PC and laptop makers, such as Lenovo, Dell, etc.) which varies but last I heard it was anywhere from like 45 dollars for the Home version on low-spec devices to somewhere around a 100 dollars for higher spec devices.

The 10/15 bucks are for keys bought in markets selling Enterprise keys most of the time. Which Microsoft didn't authorize reselling of (not that they will necessary witch-hunt people for doing so, rather they'll disable the keys or go after the companies that broke contract).


They don't. Doesn't mean that your 10/15 dollar key is the normal.

PS: The "normal" is straight up 0 dollars outside of a few countries

You act like the retail box price is the only way to bu the OS. Let me guess, you think that Office cost $300 and theres no way anyone owns a legal copy for under $50 too?

Don't forget:
3... We paid $12 for a Win license at everdeals247365.com and $30 seems rather steep in comparison.

4. People got a free 10 upgrade from their 7/8/8.1 key and after 15+ years paying $30 for more security updates doesnt sound that bad.

Who cares about updates anyway. I just made iso with 11 ltsc stripped it to barebones, even smartscreen is not working there.
Most of AppX is also removed etc etc. Update obviously is disabled permanently who need that crap anyway.
Perfect system for my needs. 65 processes running in background and 1.2gb in memory used(with nvidia drivers etc.)

People who care about security updates.

This is like building a stripped out drag racer and asking why people care about having power seats or functioning HVAC.

 

[windwhirl]

Clearly, you've never worked for any government agency in the USA.

No need to. I see the same and worse shit here (looking at the tax office using an old-ass version of Apache that's been EOL for nearly a decade and half now, and that's supposed to be free software, and the pirated software black hole that lives in the public administration).

Doesn't change the fact that they should properly manage their systems tho.

You act like the retail box price is the only way to bu the OS. Let me guess, you think that Office cost $300 and theres no way anyone owns a legal copy for under $50 too?

The retail box doesn't exist here. The equivalent is purchasing it through the MS Store if you want an official license (which gets tied to your account, with all the conveniences and problems that may bring).

Also, let's establish for this conversation that "legal" copy means you abide by all the terms of your license. Getting a key that was meant for only a certain company's use isn't legal, though I doubt anyone could truly do anything against you, since you'd not be a company, but rather a home user.

Granted, if that PC is in a company using a license from a different company, it could be problematic (I've known of companies getting sued and forced to pay the licensing costs plus fines here over pirated and misappropriated licenses for Office and Windows).

theres no way anyone owns a legal copy for under $50 too

Funnily enough, it's 50 dollars here for the Home 2024 version... though because of the taxes imposed on foreign currency and offshore payments you end up paying 75 or so. Personally tho I went for the subscription option, mostly for the convenience of it allowing me to share my license with five other people with five devices each, plus the 1TB Onedrive for each one. Since it was 35 dollars or so for the year, I guess I could say I got 6 licenses for a total of 30 devices for the price of 6 dollars per license or basically 1 dollar per device, if I really wanted to be flexible with this and stretch it out that much.

This is the beginning of rent-a-windows

Microsoft sort of already does it, I guess, though you basically rent a whole instance in the cloud with a set config of CPU cores/RAM/storage. Business/Enterprise only tho

Windows 365 Business Plans and Pricing | Microsoft

Windows 365 is for businesses that want to deploy Cloud PCs across their organization for an unlimited number of users.

www.microsoft.com

 

[A Computer Guy]

This is the beginning of rent-a-windows

Might as well sign up for Windows 365 you can run from a Chromebook in a browser.

 

[AsRock]

30$ / year is very cheap for security fixes for your operating system of choice. I hope this keep going. I wish some older microsoft operating system would get that modell also.

Some guys are on older computer and are unwilling to migrate to newer operating system or hardware. 30$ is very very very cheap.

Their way to try to get subscription based, it/s what they been wanting, well forever.

Then it be $40 and then it be $50 and so on, MS think i fell off a Christmas tree.

 

[windwhirl]

Then it be $40 and then it be $50 and so on, MS think i fell off a Christmas tree.

I don't think that will happen. Microsoft doesn't have that kind of monopoly power to just squeeze whoever they want.

Today, you have entire governments that have no Microsoft software installed.

Linux has little or nothing to feel envious about compared to Windows, and the top sites in the planet all run on servers running Linux or other free and open source operating systems.

Valve is working hard on improving some aspects of WINE, further making Windows unnecessary for some things.

Hell, more and more people replace MS Office for Google Docs or LibreOffice.

So, yeah, I think Microsoft knows they can't just shove subscriptions down everyone's throat and even trying to could backfire horribly if anything goes wrong.

 

[johnspack]

This is quite sad... offer them the same deal for an upgrade to Windows 11. What the h*.....

 

[Craptacular]

This is not going to work. There will be a huge backlash against Microsoft for trying to capitalise on Win10 and force people into Win11. Typical for-profit BS.

They are not suddenly going to stop providing free updates to hundreds of millions of PCs in schools, hospitals, transport hubs and other institutions. State governments need to intervene finally and have some serious conversations with MS.

This is prevent similar $$ that happened a few weeks ago grounding airplanes and causing severe disruption globally.

How is it typical for-profit BS? Microsoft gives the OS 10 years of security patches from the date the OS was released. Name another software company that gives you a guarantee of 120 months of security patches.

These timelines are well known and established since the late 1990s with Microsoft. A school, hospital, transport hub, etc. that doesn't know about these timelines and doesn't plan for them is nothing more than a reflection on the incompetent administration of those organizations.

 

[windwhirl]

This is quite sad... offer them the same deal for an upgrade to Windows 11. What the h*.....

The upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 is free.

 

[AGlezB]

Why should it be made obsolete? It's not very environmental of them, there's plenty of PCs that MS will not allow to run 11 because reasons, but run 10 just fine. Forcing those machines to retirement is not good at all.

There's no technical reason they *need* to stop at 10 years. 10 and 11 are shockingly similar under the hood.

Here's a rule of thumb: software maintenance costs are directly proportional to complexity and age of the software, provided the software's usage remains stable (a company isn't going to mantain a software nobody is using).

EOL reasons are always financial. OSes are very complex pieces of software that become increasingly difficult to mantain and upgrade as time passes. Kill the product and you can either move the resources and the engineering team to a new product or get rid of them and save on costs.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Here's a rule of thumb: software maintenance costs are directly proportional to complexity and age of the software, provided the software's usage remains stable (a company isn't going to mantain a software nobody is using).

EOL reasons are always financial. OSes are very complex pieces of software that become increasingly difficult to mantain and upgrade as time passes. Kill the product and you can either move the resources and the engineering team to a new product or get rid of them and save on costs.

That would work, if windows 11 wasn't windows 10 with a skin. It's just an update to the same kernel. There's fewer changes going from 22h2 to win 11 then there is going from 1503 to 22h2.

There's also the slight issue of Linux, which most distros maintain for tiny slivers of a budget compared to the $3 TRILLION+ valuation Microsoft corp, and have been maintaining their software for 20+ years. And can still run on 15+ year old hardware.

I'm sorry, I dont buy the "cost" excuse.

The upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 is free.

Only if your hardware officially supports 11. There is hardware being sold as recently as 2020 that does not support 11. A LOT of it.

I don't think that will happen. Microsoft doesn't have that kind of monopoly power to just squeeze whoever they want.

Today, you have entire governments that have no Microsoft software installed.

Linux has little or nothing to feel envious about compared to Windows, and the top sites in the planet all run on servers running Linux or other free and open source operating systems.

Valve is working hard on improving some aspects of WINE, further making Windows unnecessary for some things.

Hell, more and more people replace MS Office for Google Docs or LibreOffice.

So, yeah, I think Microsoft knows they can't just shove subscriptions down everyone's throat and even trying to could backfire horribly if anything goes wrong.

The thing that will destroy Windows will be Microsoft's insistance on depreciating its old tools.

WSUS is going away, being moved into intune (shudder). They want to move AD into intune. They push you constantly to go to cloud based administration and push all software companies to move to web based solutions and away from win32.

Should they succeed.....there will be no reason to use windows over a chromebook, macbook, or linux device. A large factor in users and companies moving away from windows is everything moving to web based.

 

[AGlezB]

That would work, if windows 11 wasn't windows 10 with a skin. It's just an update to the same kernel. There's fewer changes going from 22h2 to win 11 then there is going from 1503 to 22h2.

There's also the slight issue of Linux, which most distros maintain for tiny slivers of a budget compared to the $3 TRILLION+ valuation Microsoft corp, and have been maintaining their software for 20+ years. And can still run on 15+ year old hardware.

I'm sorry, I dont buy the "cost" excuse.

I'll make an educated guess and say you're not a software developer. That or you never raised above the level of a very junior programmer. And no, pushing the occasional commit to GitHub as a hobby is not the same as having experience in the software development business.

Let me explain: it doesn't matter how closely related 10 and 11 are. The moment the codebases diverge the effort to maintain them almost doubles. The only places where the cost remains the same is in individual components that are 100% common between codebases and there are not many of those. MMC, the RegEdit, RDClient, a few control panel applets, a few drivers and that's about it. MS is employing houndreds if not thousands of engineers plus all the devops and service infrastructure to keep alive an OS that has had a viable replacement for years and that costs a lot. The only way they can offset the cost is to take it off the pockets of the people who can afford it but can't or won't upgrade to Win 11 and by "people" I mean mostly entities en the business and education sectors because I don't expect too many actual people to pay for or even care about it.

 

[LabRat 891]

So, Microsoft wants to charge for something they'll already be providing for free? What's new, I guess...

Just like XP, Vista, and 7, there are POS/Embedded/IoT versions not fully EoL for several more years.
There's a very good chance you'll be able to get updates (manually) until Win10's Full EoL in 2032, whether you are on IoT LTSC, or not. (Win10EntIoTLTSC is 100% binary identical to Win10Ent.)

 

[thesmokingman]

This is the beginning of rent-a-windows

Yup, this is bad shit if it's accepted hook line and sinker.

 

[Makaveli]

Nothing stopping you from using 11 unless your CPU is prehistoric. Been running 11 from day 1 and it's been a rock solid OS.

Windows 11 still get out performed by Win 10 there is a reason people have been staying on it.

 

[trparky]

There’s always this… https://0patch.com/

 

[uuee]

Well, here in the "east" ppl. with "old" machines (to be incompatible with w11) are using them for a reason -they don't have enough money to upgrade. Not like there is any reason to upgrade even a sandy\ivy machine (with at least 8GB ram and an SSD OS drive) for the common folks who just browse the web. So yeah, that 30usd\year is not gonna happen for home users. Linux will gain some marketshare among older people (where a big firefox icon on the desktop mostly covers everything -that is also my plan for the pc of my retired mom) while younger guys will either install w11 on unsupported machines or use w10 without updates (at least until they have the money to upgrade their hardware).

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Meanwhile, happy that I got Pro for at or around 2-hundy.

 

[rtwjunkie]

which I think I've found in Stardock's Start11.

All of their Starts (8, 10) have been stellar so far. You get a good measure of control and it is not widespread system changes.

 

[MacZ]

The amount of people saying it's okay to pay 30 bucks for security updates is alarming.. lol

I will gladly pay $30 for not upgrading to W11 for one year (or more).

Select a bunch of files, click on them to drag & drop .... oops, sorry, you deselected everything because you clicked between the files.
Yeah : rock solid OS.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I'll make an educated guess and say you're not a software developer. That or you never raised above the level of a very junior programmer. And no, pushing the occasional commit to GitHub as a hobby is not the same as having experience in the software development business.

I'll make a snarky educated guess as well: You're a programmer who has fallen for the fallacy that many programmers do, that because they understand one very complicated thing (programming) that they therefore understand ALL complex things, like financing or budgets or business decisions.

Let me explain: it doesn't matter how closely related 10 and 11 are. The moment the codebases diverge the effort to maintain them almost doubles. The only places where the cost remains the same is in individual components that are 100% common between codebases and there are not many of those. MMC, the RegEdit, RDClient, a few control panel applets, a few drivers and that's about it. MS is employing houndreds if not thousands of engineers plus all the devops and service infrastructure to keep alive an OS that has had a viable replacement for years and that costs a lot. The only way they can offset the cost is to take it off the pockets of the people who can afford it but can't or won't upgrade to Win 11 and by "people" I mean mostly entities en the business and education sectors because I don't expect too many actual people to pay for or even care about it.

I highly doubt that maintaining security updates for windows 10 costs as much as active development of windows 11. IF it did, they would not be offering an "educational" $1 update fee, that would be a huge loss on their part.

Besides the fact, of course, that the multi TRILLION dollar microsoft has been maintaining security updates only for two years on windows 10 already while updating 11. Gonna guess it isnt breaking the bank right now.

Also, no, windows 11 is NOT a viable replacement for the tens of millions of individuals and businesses with intel 7th gen or earlier PCs, of which there are tens of millions of worldwide. In much of the world that is not USA/west europe, people are often still rocking core 2 era hardware, and their upgrade coming up will be used haswell-skylake era hardware which cannot run 10. Even stateside there are plenty of people or businesses that bought skylake hardware that still has plenty of life left in it that cannot run 11, not because they cannot physically do it, but because Microsoft arbitrarily decided to not let 11 run officially on said hardware. As I've said before, there are 3 7th gen CPUs that can run 11, and the rest cannot, despite all fo them having the same core arch, same security, and being identical to 6th gen skylake. Totally arbitrary.

What MS has done here is create another XP scenario where their obsolete OS continues to be used by a huge chunk of the populace, now backed up by hardware restrictions. The fallout is gonna be fun to watch.

Yup, this is bad shit if it's accepted hook line and sinker.

This is such a bizarre 5G enabled conspiracy theory. MS offered the same package with windows 7 and with windows XP. The only difference is this time a consumer can buy it. Somehow this equals windows 365 for all?

MS is doing this because they have a serious issue they refuse to address: they have purposely decided to maroon a sizeable chunk of the populace on computers that cannot run 10, and they severely underestimate how many people that adds up to. So they're gonna offer this to support the huge population using 10, because if they dont and security issues start coming out, we'll have another XP botnet scenario, but MS cant brick those PCs to keep them offline because the outrage would be deafening.

I expect they will extend this offer repeatedly after they see that the people who cannot afford new PCs still cant afford new PCs next year.