Windows 11 Upgrade & Windows 10 Migration in London

Free Windows 10 support ended in October 2025. Since then, consumer machines have been kept patched through the Extended Security Updates programme — and after Microsoft extended it by a year, that now stops on 12 October 2027. Here's what changes, in plain terms:

None of this calls for panic — you now have until October 2027. It calls for using that time deliberately: enrol in ESU now, then upgrade or replace on your own schedule rather than Microsoft's.

Windows 11 has a hardware bar that Windows 10 never had, so a perfectly healthy, fast machine can still be refused. The usual blockers are:

• TPM 2.0 — a security chip that must be present and switched on. On a lot of machines it's already there but disabled in the BIOS, and simply enabling it clears the check.
• Secure Boot — often turned off, or unavailable because the disk is still using the older MBR partition style rather than GPT. Both are usually fixable.
• Processor generation — broadly, Intel 8th-generation Core and newer, and AMD Ryzen 2000 series and newer. This is the blocker that can't be worked around, and it's the one that catches most older machines.
• The basics — 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage as an absolute floor, though in practice you want comfortably more than the minimum for the machine to be pleasant to live with.

There are ways to force Windows 11 onto unsupported hardware. We'll explain them honestly if you ask, but we don't recommend them: Microsoft doesn't guarantee updates for machines installed that way, which quietly reintroduces the exact problem you were trying to solve. Where a machine genuinely can't be upgraded, replacing it is the honest answer — and often a cheaper one than it first sounds.

An office with ten or thirty machines has a different problem to a household with one laptop. The kit was bought at different times, runs different software, and can't all be down at once. This is how we work through it:

• Audit first — we inventory every machine: model, age, processor, TPM and Secure Boot status, storage, and what each one is actually used for. You end up with a list, not a guess.
• Sort into three piles — upgrade now, upgrade later, replace. Most fleets split roughly this way, and knowing the split is what turns a vague worry into a budget you can plan against.
• Check the software, not just the hardware — line-of-business applications, practice management systems, accounting packages and older peripherals are where upgrades really go wrong. We test the awkward ones on a pilot machine before rolling out widely.
• Pilot, then stage — a small representative group goes first and lives with it for a week. The rest follow in batches timed around your working pattern rather than all in one go.
• Plan the spend — replacements can be staggered across months or financial years once you know which machines are genuinely at the end of the road and which have another two or three years in them.
• Handle the old machines properly — data securely wiped before anything leaves the building, and retired kit disposed of or repurposed rather than piled in a cupboard with your files still on it.

Fleet audits and staged rollouts are quoted per site after we've seen what you have. Most offices find the audit alone is worth doing early, because it converts the October 2027 deadline into a dated, costed plan you can actually work to.