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Microsoft will continue to support Windows 10 with security updates through October 14, 2025. But the company will stop selling Windows 10 licenses to consumers through the Microsoft Store at the end of this month.
The company has added notes to the Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro pages in the Microsoft Store alerting customers that “January 31, 2023 will be the last day this Windows 10 download is offered for sale.”
You may still be able to buy Windows 10 from third-party sellers after that point, but with less than three years of official support left, it’s clear Microsoft would rather push users to buy Windows 11 instead. Of course, switching to another operating system (like a GNU/Linux distribution, a BSD distro, or even Chrome OS Flex) may be an option for some folks.
Enterprise customers may also be able to squeeze a little extra life out of their Windows 10 licenses – while support for consumer versions of the operating system will end in 2025, Microsoft will offer mainstream support for Windows 10 Enterprise and IoT Enterprise editions until 2027, and extended support for another few years after that (for customers who pay for that option).
via Windows Central
I really hope this doesn’t mean that I won’t be able to use the media creation tool, in the event I need to re-install Windows.
Just use rufus and Windows 10 ISO image. Rufus will make a install media on a USB. Put that USB in and run it and install Windows from it.
You can also do factory data reset in settings. Or System Image backup, a bit more complicated at first, but very nice feature.
You can still get older operating system images, and that would include the media creation tool, though likely you’d have to hunt for the Windows 10 version. Your license keys will still activate that version as well. All this does is to stop selling new license keys.
Incidentally, when I installed Windows 11 from scratch, my license key for 10 activated it fine. I don’t know for sure, but it may work the other way as well if you buy a Windows 11 license key and enter it after installing the older version.