Sun Behind the Clouds

Windows 10 Support Changes

Posted on September 30, 2018 Updated on March 31, 2019

I previously posted about changes to Microsoft’s Windows 10 support and things are changing again.  While Microsoft continues with twice yearly feature releases of Windows 10 Microsoft has announced that it will now provide 30 months of support for Enterprise and Education versions of Windows 10 released in the fall and 18 months of support for Pro and Home versions. Spring releases stay the same at 18 months. Is that confusing? Remember that the twice yearly releases are targeted for release in March and September and as such are referred to as Year+Spring and Year+Fall or YYH1 and YYH2 releases. So the release targeted for March 2018 would be referred to as Spring 2018 or 18H1. Understanding that, here’s a table to help sort out the support models:

It’s great that organizations that can’t keep up with the 18 month upgrade pace either permanently or temporarily can opt for slowing down once on a fall release. Organizations that want the feature upgrades faster (often for updated new security features) can still upgrade before the 30 month end of support either to a spring or a fall release depending on the cadence that they want to adopt. This gives them an option to mix and match with fully supported upgrade cycles that can be 6,12,18,24 and 30 months as required.

This is great news for Windows 10 customers but there are still many organizations struggling to upgrade from Windows 7 before extended support runs out on January 14, 2020. As part of the same post Microsoft also released information about paid Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows 7 until 2023.