The upgrade can be deferred for some months by Win 10 Pro/Ent users(= n-1 version), but not by Win 10 Home users. In the case of Win 10 users, support for more than 2 years depends on them upgrading to the latest or n-1 version which is released about once every 8 months. In comparison, Win 7/8.1 users have support for about 10 years before EOL is reached in 2020/2023, and it is not dependent on whether they could do a version upgrade or SP(Service Pack) update. So, there are many Win 10 users who will be forever stuck with Version 1507/RTM, 1511, 1607, 1703, etc, ie could not upgrade. Even some who bought new OEM Win 10 RTM Version 1507 in 2015 could not upgrade to Win 10 Version 1511, eg budget/cheap OEM Win 10 2-in-1 tablets that came with only 32GB of eMMC Flash storage.

Furthermore, some of them could not rollback to Win 7/8.1. Many Win 7/8.1 users who took the free GWX Win 10 upgrade offer from 29 July 2015 onward, found that they could not upgrade to the next version of Win 10 mainly because of older hardware incompatibility. This means each version of Win 10 have an EOL of about 24 months before support from M$ ends, eg Win 10 Version 1511’s EOL will be around Nov 2017 and Win 10 Version 1607’s EOL will be around Aug 2018. Now You: What's your take on the faster update cycle? It lists the version of the operating system right in the second line. To find out which version of Windows is installed on your computer, do the following: This year will be especially taxing for IT departments as Microsoft plans to release two feature upgrades (the first was the Creators Update). The faster release scheme makes it difficult for Enterprise customers who don't run the LTSB to keep up. Most Windows 10 machines are no longer on the RTM version, unless the system administrator changed system settings to block updates from being deployed on it. The next feature update will be released at the end of 2017, making it four feature updates in about 2 years.Īnother difference is that Microsoft made it a lot harder to block updates on Windows 10. Microsoft released three feature updates so far since July 2015 for Windows 10. Probably the biggest difference to before is that feature updates are released at a much higher pace than Service Packs. On Windows 10, the support period for any version is about 18 months. Non-Service Pack versions of Windows were supported for about 2 years after the release of the Service Pack.

This is true to a degree, but there are a couple of differences.įirst, the support period is shorter on Windows 10. You may say that this is similar to support changed when Microsoft released Service Packs for older versions of Windows.

Win 10 rtm professional retail