Using Windows 10 past EOL (via LTSC supported to 2032) | Hacker News Reader

Using Windows 10 past EOL (via LTSC supported to 2032)

massgrave.dev

40 pointsxeonmc24 comments

My PC doesn't have TPM. It's old, but still perfectly fine to run for my needs. I use Unreal 5, play games, watch videos. Could run quicker but it's no landfill device. I don't think it'll suddenly fall to pieces come October so I wasn't looking to scrap it by then.

Looks like the IoT LTSC version will work. I'm still hoping that Microsoft relent on this move. Last I checked Windows 10 is still a very popular OS and I find it unlikely that people are going to update if they haven't already. If some kind of WannaCry attack happens due to a security hole it's going to look bad on them.

Also, as a kinda dark humor moment. October 14th is the retirement day of Windows 10, which is also international e-waste day. Unless I missed the memo, I thought it was an effort to prevent creating e-waste not one of planned obsolescence to try and make more.

I've put IoT LTSC on a couple 10 year old laptops we use for misc things and it runs great.

10LTSC + Office 2016 + open shell is the peak windows experience.

2016 was the last year you could autosave documents locally, then fucking OneDrive.

Grab an ISO from Massgrave, write using Rufus and two scripts later your fully tweaked.

irm https://get.activated.win | iex

iwr -useb https://christitus.com/win | iex

using a disk image and some scripts from the web seem like a bad practice to get something 'secure' up and running. Note: never used massgrave. Just doesn't sound trustworthy from the name. If you can, download from msdn directly.

Massgrave ISOs actually download from Microsoft. It's just a small wrapper app that links you to the correct version. Microsoft also provides hashes, so it's pretty easy to validate that you're getting a legitimate ISO.

No comment on the other scripts. Although the source is available...

massgrave is assuredly safe. microsoft has even been caught telling customers to use it during support tickets.

> using a disk image and some scripts from the web seem like a bad practice to get something 'secure' up and running.

> If you can, download from msdn directly.

Using anything from Microsoft "seem like a bad practice to get something 'secure' up and running. "

Win7 + Office 2003 for me (pre-ribbon, thanks)

Agreed, but risk to reward is off for me, potentially risky running old software.

It depends entirely on what it is and what it does.

I would certainly not recommend using Outlook 2003 in 202x, but then, I would not recommend running Outlook, full stop.

But using Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2003 today, on local files? Yes, that is pretty safe on an updated and secured PC.

First, you must install Office 2003 SP3:

https://archive.org/details/OFFICE_2003_SP3_INST

Then you are fairly safe.

It is very noticeable that if you install the "Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats" – still available on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/file-format-converters_202107

... then this installs a lot of extra stuff, and that means the PC suddenly needs lots of extra security updates.

So if you don't need it, don't install it.

Me, I use Word 2003 and nothing else. All my other needs are served perfectly well by LibreOffice Calc, Impress, etc.

What's the experience with Windows 11? I haven't upgraded because Microsoft doesn't have a great track record of not screwing things, and I would hate their upgrade process to destroy the data in my harddrives. Which means I'll have to buy a NAS and do a full backup of everything before upgrading, and then pray that that software I bought years ago and that since then have transitioned to cough-money-monthly (like Zbrush) will not stop working. All in all, the risk of updating Windows for me is about several thousands dollars. If they charged a flat fee of 100 USD/year per user for maintaining Windows 10, I would pay; it would be a no brainer.

We upgrated about 400 computers to 24H2 in the last two months and it wasn't too much of an issue. It's largely the same OS underneath. In term of UI, the only improvement is tabbed file explorer (but some might not like it). Other UI change are for the worse (worse task bar, can't make it bigger, notifications only show part of the message (and you can't get the full message even by clicking, more stuff moved to the problematic settings menu, etc).

Thanks. I'm not happy about worse UI, but it gives me hopes that at least the upgrade and the compatibility are okey.

It's very comparable to the difference between 10 and 7. Microsoft glued on an extra layer of fugly UI over the existing workable UI and just left it to rot.

If you right click something to bring up the context menu, you get a gross liquid ass style menu and then you have to click through to open the classic context menu to get the option you want. Why. Literally what is the point of this?!

Everything is worse, more annoying, and uglier in various quantities. They actually even managed to make Bluetooth even worse than in W10, which is frankly an astonishing achievement

Yeah, it's so bad. Change for the sake of change.. Absolutely zero benefit for people who use this OS

I just looked up stats on the install base. I don't know how trustworthy statcounter is, but they state that this data is from may

  Desktop Windows Versions  Percentage Market Share
  Win10  53.19%
  Win11  43.22%
  Win7    2.48%
  WinXP  0.54%
  Win8.1  0.29%
  Win8    0.22% 
  Desktop Windows Version Market Share Worldwide - May 2025

The LTSC editions work very well.

I wrote an article about them:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/22/windows_10_ltsc/

I have them running under both VirtualBox (works but is a little fragile) and VMware (which is now freeware, of course) where it runs very smoothly and quickly.

Since I like old Thinkpads with full-travel keyboards, none of my own laptops can run Win11 without hacks. I dislike it anyway.

So although I mainly run Linux, I think come October I will nuke my dusty and rarely-booted Windows 10 partitions and replace them with LTSC.

The IoT edition only supports US English, which is a minor PITA, but it works and I can set a UK English keyboard layout. It's perfectly usable. I DGAF about US spellings in the UI but it's annoying that I need 2 locales configured, and a local switcher I never use, just to have a UK keyboard.

What's the best strategy for a full backup and recovery if updating to LTSC goes wrong?

Maybe create a full disk system image? But also upgrade adds a way to restore itself

The thing is that with the LTSC branch, you never get full-version upgrades. That is why it exists.

The full-version upgrade here is LTSC

Ah, OK, I see what you mean. All right then, my mistake.

I suggest making a disk-to-image backup of your whole boot drive using clonezilla, to a second external disk.

To test recovery, take a third spare drive, restore to it from the backup image using clonezilla, and replace your boot drive with it. If this boots up well, you could even do your upgrade tests using this spare disk, restoring from the backup file as necessary. Then once you're confident, put your boot drive back in and proceed to upgrade it.

Bookmarked this for some weekend fiddling.

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