Borrowed time — the Windows 10 exit
Deadline — 14 October 2026Microsoft
Free Windows 10 updates ended last October. The paid bridge (~£60 per device) expires on 14 October 2026 — and surveys found only 38% of businesses had a migration plan. After that date, every new Windows 11 security fix doubles as a map to the same hole in unpatched Windows 10.
Your version has fifteen people and a mixed fleet: half the machines took the Windows 11 upgrade years ago, and half can't — too old, wrong chip. Nobody has wanted to open the “new laptops” conversation, so last October someone paid the extension fee to make the problem go away. It goes away again on 14 October. This time the price doubles, and the machines aren't getting younger.
This is you if You paid for ESU in a hurry and haven't thought about it since; nobody knows which machines can even take Windows 11; “New laptops” is a conversation everyone avoids.
How we run it
Half a day of audit, one page of answers.
Every machine checked: can it upgrade, is it worth upgrading, or is it honestly done. You get traffic lights on a single page, not a forty-page report nobody reads.
Then the repair-shop judgement call.
Twelve years inside machines — via Fixfactor, our sister workshop — means we can tell a laptop worth £80 of memory from one worth recycling. Most IT firms skip this step and quote for replacing everything; we would rather you keep the machines that deserve keeping.
The changeover happens in the evenings, two or three machines at a time.
Each person leaves on Friday and arrives Monday to a working machine with their files, their printers and their quirks intact. There is no “migration week”, because nobody can afford one.
And the retired drives get wiped, with a record.
A drawer of old laptops is a data breach waiting for a skip. We close that door properly, and you get the paperwork that says so.
Made boring by: a scoped job at a per-machine rate agreed up front — or it never gets urgent at all, because lifecycle planning is part of every plan. Per-job · planning inside Core £39/user/month
Real deadline: Microsoft's ESU calendar. The fifteen-person firm is illustrative.