You won't hear any lectures from me, as I know how hard it is to let go of tech that's served you well. My last gaming laptop lasted me 10 years before the recovery partition on the hard drive finally said 'no more!' True, it had been ailing for some time before then, repeatedly switching off mid-match in League of Legends—though maybe my elderly gaming laptop was just trying to do me a favour on that one.
Still, there's few excuses for hanging on to an OS that's about to be ousted. Steam's monthly hardware and software survey has revealed that as of January 2025 44.41% of PC users are still using Windows 10, an OS that will lose support this October. But rather than simply being overly attached to an almost decade old OS, there's more to this story.
Just for a start, taking a peek at the Wayback Machine shows these numbers for January 2025 looked noticeably different earlier this month. While the same portion of players using Windows 10 sat at 42.87%, the earlier version of the January survey also reported that usage of Steam in all bar two languages was down. The fact this decrease was not matched by increases in other represented languages stood out, but what really got our attention was the survey's claim that usage of every listed video card was also down.
- Microsoft nixes details of its Windows 11 TPM 2.0 security bypass though there are still other ways of getting the latest OS on 'unsupported' hardware
- Windows 10, 32 GB of RAM, and the RTX 4060 all surge to the top spot in the Steam Hardware Survey, seemingly due to a huge influx of Chinese-language user data
This suggests something was definitely off about the data, and has since been corrected. That still leaves us pondering why so many Steam users find themselves in a predicament with Windows 10, and it's highly unlikely to be as simple as 'laziness'—the reason behind any statistic seldom is.
Debuting in 2021, Windows 11 is surprisingly demanding as far as system requirements go. When it comes to older, but still perfectly serviceable hardware, it's totally understandable why many would prefer to hold out rather than upgrade their PC just so Windows 11 has a cushier pad to land on. That said, installing Windows 11 on technically unsupported hardware is fairly easy these days thanks to free tools like Rufus and now Flyby11.
What's also likely is that this chunk of the Steam survey pie isn't just made up of individual users with individual machines running the soon-to-be-outdated Windows 10, but rather establishments like internet cafes. Maintaining any hardware in constant contact with the general public is time consuming at best and a losing battle at worst. With that in mind, it stands to reason that many internet cafe proprietors would put off big updates like upgrading the OS.
That doesn't mean we'll necessarily see a sharp dip in Steam users on Windows 10 come October though. To be clear, end of support for the OS doesn't mean it'll either blink out of existence or brick your PC. Instead, this end of support only means that it will become increasingly ill-advised to keep using Windows 10 as Microsoft won't push out new updates, like security fixes, for this particular OS.
Last year, our Jeremy wrote about just how quickly hackers could sniff out a virtual machine running Windows XP, a much beloved OS that has long since lost official support, and load it up with malware; losing regular security updates is no small thing. We've known for awhile the end is nigh for Windows 10, but if this is news to you—or you're just feeling a bit overwhelmed about the prospect of finally updating your OS—don't fret. Check out our feature on what to do next for your Windows 10 machine right here.
