Microsoft’s Free Offer Deadline—Millions Of Windows Users Must Now Decide

Be warned — Microsoft’s campaign to push Windows 10 holdouts over to Windows 11 is now getting very serious. Yes, we have seen plenty of warnings and nags, but the campaign also now includes some quieter, more critical steps. And for 400 million users, it’s time to decide before it’s too late. Your options are suddenly being cut.

The good news for Microsoft is that this is working — to an extent at least. We saw a significant uptick in Windows 11 upgrades in January after a couple of months of Windows 10 recovering market share at the end of last year. But that might be down to a hint from Microsoft that free Windows 11 upgrades were on a deadline.

While the Windows-maker withdrew the document suggesting a deadline or cutoff, the free upgrade is an option for Windows 10 users, and it’s entirely possible that this offer will fall away when Windows 10 reaches end-of-life in October. It’s not clear.

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What is clear, though, is that while an estimated 400 million Windows 10 users can upgrade to Windows 11 given its hardware hurdles, there are around that same number again (estimated) who cannot. And for those users, there is the option of a 12-month extended support plan for $30 but then it really will be the end of the road.

There have been a raft of workarounds, tips and tricks to get around the hardware hurdles, and coverage of these has unsurprisingly increased in recent months. But the bad news for Windows users on older PCs is that those workarounds are falling away.

As I updated last week, Microsoft has removed its instructions on tweaking the Windows Registry from an official support document, seemingly taking that option off the table, and now it has done the same with another favored workaround.

Last year I reported on Flyby11, which “offers all ‘working methods to bypass the restrictions for installing Windows 11 24H2 on unsupported hardware,’ per its developer. “I wrote the tool in about an hour for a good friend, just to make a quick solution for a specific problem they were facing. Since it turned out to be quite useful, I thought I’d share it with the community as well.”

The idea behind Flyby11 is to automate as much of the hacked upgrade process as it can, meaning inexperienced users can make the switch without playing with settings and processes they don’t understand and don’t really want to touch.

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Well that was then and this is now. As Neowin has discovered, “Microsoft [has] blocked [the] free Windows 11 24H2 system requirements bypass app as potential malware.” It seems the recent application update “has incorporated a Registry tweak that Microsoft itself once hosted on its official Windows 11 installation guidance, even though the company now probably wants you to forget about it.” In of itself not an issue. But Neowin warns that “the developer of Flyby11 has added that Microsoft Defender flags the app as PUA or potentially unwanted application.” If your download and install is flagged, it may be stopped depending on how your device and network is secured.

This campaign is not going to let-up. I warned last year that workarounds might fall away as Microsoft starts restricting these options. The bottom-line is that we still don’t know what will happen as October approaches. Will we really see hundreds of millions of PCs fall of support, or is there a hasty plan-b in the works.

For those that can upgrade, you should do so before October. That means no $30 support fee and no risk that free upgrades will be interrupted by Windows 10’s end-of-life. For those without the right hardware, maybe it’s time to take Microsoft up on its push for 2025 to be the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh. Either way, don’t fall off support if that ends up being your fallback option — it’s not worth the risk.