One billion PCs run end-of-life Windows 10, despite half of them supporting Windows 11 upgrade
One billion PCs are still running the Windows 10 operating system, which reached end-of-life in October, despite half of them being completely capable of running Windows 11, according to Dell. Unwillingness to switch leaves many systems vulnerable to security exploits, and it appears that upgrading is not that straightforward.
More than 1 billion out of 1.5 billion installed PCs remain either unconverted to Windows 11 or too old, according to Jeff Clarke, Vice Chairman and Co-Chief Operating Officer at Dell Technologies.
The company sees one billion units as a durable PC refresh cycle opportunity.
“We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded. And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can’t run Windows 11,” Clarke said during Dell’s earnings call for investors, as transcribed and shared by The Motley Fool.
Dell also said that this upgrade cycle from end-of-life OS to Windows 11, as compared to the previous generation, is 10-12 percentage points behind.
Statcounter.com’s latest data showed that the proportion between Windows 10 and Windows 11 desktop computers remained little changed in November, at 42.7% and 53.7% respectively.
This means that many Windows PCs might be sitting ducks for hackers. Since the official end of support on October 14th, 2025, Microsoft has released major security updates as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday schedule. These are only available to Windows 10 users who enrolled in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program.
However, to enroll in the ESU program, users need to sign in with a Microsoft account. Some privacy-conscious users, who prefer local accounts, are hesitant to link their personal data to their PC usage and are unwilling to share their data with the tech giant.
Many users have already switched to Linux. Zorin OS announced it has amassed 1 million downloads in just over a month.
BIOS might be the issue
Reddit users may have one answer as to why many Windows 10 machines remain unupgraded, despite being perfectly capable of doing so – it all boils down to the BIOS. For many users, the BIOS (UEFI) is a black box – they don’t know how to access it, update it, change settings, and might not even understand what BIOS (UEFI) is.
First, many users don’t have the Secure Boot feature enabled, which may prevent compatibility with Windows 11. However, it seems it’s not that easy to simply enable it even for advanced users.
Other redditors cite the requirement of multiple firmware updates to achieve compatibility.
“My old computer wouldn't support Windows 11 without around 15 incremental BIOS updates, and I said ***k no to that,” one Redditor posted.
“For the record, I ‘just needed to enable safe boot’ on my Ryzen and it was several hours of non-trivial work from someone who is generally competent in IT and programming,” another confirmed.
Apparently, Windows 11 requires a newer disk format called GPT (GUID Partition Table) instead of the traditional MBR (Master Boot Record) format. However, many older Windows 10 PCs use MBR and require wiping the entire hard drive or using a specific tool before upgrading.
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