windows10

Windows 10 Extended Security Updates

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Screenshot which says 'You're eligible to enrol in Extended Security Updates at no extra cost'

Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in just two days time. What this means is, if you’re using Windows 10 and don’t take action, you’ll no longer get security updates for your computer. And that would be bad – your computer is therefore at greater risk of viruses and malware.

Previously, when Microsoft ended support for Windows, if you were a home user then you were on your own. This time, Microsoft is offering the Extended Security Updates programme, and making it available to home users for the first time. I suppose this is because Windows 11 installs only exceeded Windows 10 as recently as June this year, and around 45% of Windows users still use Windows 10 despite it being 10 years old now. This includes us.

Upgrade or replace

Ideally, Microsoft wants you to upgrade to Windows 11. Many Windows 10 computers can be upgraded, but not all. If not, then, as far as Microsoft is concerned, you should be considering purchasing a new computer.

At home, we have a Lenovo Ideapad 320S which is approaching its eighth birthday. That’s pretty old for a laptop, and it’s been used heavily as it was my main work computer during lockdown. Theoretically, it might run Windows 11, if I backed everything up, wiped its SSD and did a fresh install. But Microsoft’s PC Health Check app won’t allow an in-place upgrade, as its processor (an Intel Core i3 in the 7000 series) doesn’t meet its minimum hardware requirements.

We will, eventually, replace this with a new laptop running Windows 11 – probably some time next year. But for now, this little survivor meets our needs – especially as, back in 2021, I upgraded its RAM from 4 gigabytes to 16 gigabytes.

Enrolling for Extended Security Updates

If you open Windows Update on a Windows 10 machine, you should see the option to enrol for Extended Security Updates. This gives you an additional year of security updates, to allow you time to either upgrade or buy a new computer. As mentioned, this is a new offering for home users; previously, only enterprise users ever had this option.

Enrolling for extended security updates may cost you, depending on your system settings. If, at the time you sign up, you’re already synchronising your PC settings, then you may be offered the extended security updates at no charge. This is what happened to us, as per the screenshot at the top of this blog post. Which was nice.

Alternatively, if you live in the European Economic Area (EEA), then you should also get the updates for free. Thanks to Brexit, us Brits unfortunately no longer live in the EEA.

If you’re not eligible for free updates, then Microsoft will charge you. If you use Microsoft Rewards, then you can redeem 1000 reward points instead of paying money. Alternatively, there’s a $30 charge, which works out at about £24 for the year.

What about Linux?

If you don’t want to buy a new PC, aren’t eligible for free updates and don’t want to pay, then I suppose the other option is to consider running some flavour of Linux on your existing PC. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this, but if you’re really stuck for money and have the time to learn how to use a new operating system, then sure, I guess it’s an option to consider.

We need to buy a new printer

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Photo of the HP Deskjet All-in-One F2140 printer

Here’s a photo of our current printer. It’s a HP Deskjet All-in-one F2140, and I think it dates from around 2008. Suffice to say, it predates the computer that it’s connected to, has been through several house moves and periods in storage, and even predates my relationship with Christine. You can also see how much dust is on top of it, and I’ll admit to having to shift a pile of documents stacked up on top of it to get the photo.

Okay, so we don’t use it very often. But having a printer is useful from time to time, and we use the scanner every now and then. Christine and I recently scanned all of our qualification certificates, so that we had electronic copies on hand in our shared Dropbox folder.

So why the need for a new printer? It still works, and we can still get hold of new cartridges easily.

The issue is networking.

Christine’s new laptop

Christine recently bought herself a new laptop – a very lightweight Lenovo Ideapad 320S. She’s doing a part-time university course, and her previous laptop bought in 2010 (when we first started dating) was getting too slow. It’s also big and bulky compared with what you can buy new nowadays. As she will need to print from time to time, she tasked me with setting up the printer on her laptop.

Our HP printer isn’t wireless, and so it’s connected to my Mac Mini (also dating from 2010) by a USB cable. I’ve been using Apple’s Bonjour network sharing protocol to share it across our Wifi network. For Windows, Apple offers a Bonjour Print Services utility that will discover any printers shared using Bonjour. And on Christine’s old laptop, this worked fine.

But I couldn’t get it to work on her new laptop. I think the core issue is that Apple last updated the Bonjour Print Services tool in 2010, and so it pre-dates Windows 10 by some time. Her old laptop was set up under Windows 7 and so was fine. Despite following my own printer sharing guide, and manually installing HP’s Windows 10 drivers, I could not get the Bonjour Printer Wizard to complete without failing with a permissions error (even when running as Administrator).

Whilst my Mac is generally on all of the time, it’s probably about time that we replaced it with a proper wireless printer. To get it to work with my iPhone and iPad, I’m using Printopia, which works okay but it’s a bit of a hack. Having a proper wireless printer, which works with all of our devices (Windows, Mac, iOS and Android) would be a big improvement. Especially when it comes to scanning, which we can currently only do on my very slow Mac.

A custom solution?

New wireless printers start at £30, so it wouldn’t be a big expense. In fact, it’d be about the same price as buying a new Raspberry Pi and setting up some kind of bespoke solution. Which, whilst appealing to my geeky side, would probably take a lot of the very little free time that I have nowadays. Plus, there would be the added ‘fun’ of trying to find a way of scanning documents on the Raspberry Pi, and then have them available to use on our other devices. I’m sure it’s possible, but what’s the point when you can buy an off-the-shelf product that already does this?

I could also look at buying a printer sharing hub, but again, the cost would probably be about the same as a new printer. So I might as well just buy a new printer.

We’ll have a look out for any good deals and will buy a new printer soon.