Why abandoning Windows 10 is a real ecological time bomb ?

© Microsoft

The deadline is already known. You have until October 14, 2025 to upgrade to Windows 11. You can theoretically stay on Windows 10 after this deadline, except that you expose yourself to security risks and certain bugs, because Microsoft will no longer support this OS.

The consequences of the upgrade to Windows 11 in figures

According to a study published last January by the site specializing in digital sobriety Green IT, and spotted by our colleagues at Numériques, this shift will also have an environmental impact that is far from negligible.

In detail, the collective estimates that manufacturing and selling the 240 million PCs to replace these devices, which could still work well on Windows 10, is equivalent to “186 billion km in a thermal car” or “10 % of France's annual greenhouse gas emissions”.

This could generate up to 37 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, or a carbon footprint equivalent to “4.7 million trips around the world& ;#8221;.

To this already bleak assessment, we must add the exhaustion of the abiotic resources necessary for production of these machines, or approximately “14 billion tons of excavated earth”.

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And Green IT concludes: “These figures are dizzying! They also remind us to what extent a single publisher, among GAFAM, can considerably crush/attenuate the efforts made by each of us on a daily basis, by making the decision to stop technical support for one of these softwares. ;#8221;.

The association calls in particular for action by the EU and its member states to force, or at least encourage, large software publishers to provide longer updates and to stop blocking installing new versions.

Microsoft warns users

The message has been received, but it does not seem likely to slow Microsoft down in its efforts. Determined, the Redmond firm has also taken an initiative that has annoyed some Internet users.

Windows 10 users have thus seen an advertisement appear that encourages them to switch to Windows 11 if they have not already done so. Moreover, this message is also intended for all those whose device will be able to support Windows 11 but also for all those whose computer is not supported. To learn more about this, we invite you to reread our dedicated article here.

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