i deleted windows 10

Oct 14, 2025 came and went, and that was the end-of-support day for Windows 10.

While true Microsoft has offered a way to have Win10 continue to receive updates for longer, that's not free for United States users.

Given I hardly used Win10 at all, I deleted it.

I've been using Linux for over 2 years because I made the decision to get off Windows as my daily driver early. No regrets there. On my second computer which was running Win10, I bumped that up to Win11 a few times. Why a few times? The first time I installed that OS, I absolutely hated it and went back to 10. Some time passed, I installed 11 again, hated it again, back to 10 again.

I flip-flopped between 10 and 11 until I finally said screw it, fine, I will just install 11 and stick with it. I made my peace with that OS.

However, I still kept an SSD with 10 on it just in case I wanted to go back to it. My thinking was okay, I'll eventually just get rid of it sometime before 2026.

Then I thought okay, this is dumb. Win11 is working and I have no good reason to keep 10 anymore. I still hate 11, and that hasn't changed, but it's not like I'm going back to 10.

That is when I plugged in the SSD with 10 into my Linux computer and did the deed. I backed up what I needed to, launched a partition manager, unmounted the drive, removed the partitions, created new ones, mounted the drive to make sure it worked, it did, and that was the end of it. Yes, I could have done the secure-erase thing with the terminal command shred in Linux, but since there was no sensitive data on the drive, I just blew away the partitions and made new ones. The only barely-difficult decision was whether to use exFAT or ext4. I went with exFAT just in case I ever need to connect the drive to Win11, as 11 doesn't give me any grief with that particular drive format.

Another reason I blew away the drive is because I never had any real emotional connection to 10.

Yes, you can have an emotional connection to an operating system. Don't let anyone tell you differently. And it's more than just the way it looks. There is such a thing as a feel to an OS. If the OS feels good to use, you want to stay with it and not change to something else.

The last Windows I had an emotional connection with was the best Windows ever, Windows 7. I never had any connection with 10, especially considering I was forced into using the OS. What happened was that I initially tried 10 when it was first available, didn't like it, tried to switch back to it and uh-oh, my Microsoft product key was now "invalid" even though I had BOUGHT it prior. I could not go back to 7 and had to use 10. After that was several months of fighting with 10 just to get it to work the way I wanted it to. I was mostly able to do that, but never fully.

There is one thing I will give to 11 that 10 doesn't have. The default environment is better.

An absolute bone stock installation of 10 is an absolute trash pile where the user experience is concerned. It doesn't matter how many settings you adjust because it is permanently awful. Win11, after about a half-hour to an hour of digging through the OS to disable the crap (as much as can be done) is in fact more tolerable than the 10 experience. I'm not saying it's good, because it's not. But it is more tolerable. Slightly.

The only way to make 10 tolerable is by using O&O ShutUp 10++ to disable everything possible, then reboot. For whatever breaks, you go back into ShutUp 10, cherry pick only the bare minimum you need to enable again to fix the broken crap, reboot again. It takes several rounds of going into ShutUp 10 and rebooting before you get a Win10 that's usable. And by usable, I mean tolerable.

I did use the ShutUp program for Win11 initially, but that broke things, and I did not want to do the cherry picking thing with ShutUp in 11 like I did in 10. Instead, I just looked around 11, disabled what crap I could, looked up some documentation online for instruction on how to disable more crap, then disabled more crap, and about an hour later, I said yep, good enough. Again, not good. Good enough, since it's not like I use this trash OS on a daily basis anyway.

There is one good thing for those staying on 10

There will come a point where 10 becomes unusable, either due to newer software that won't work (probably a web browser update) or newer hardware that won't work (probably due to control software that "requires" 11).

Until then, Win10 should now be at a place where users will enjoy it the most for about a year or two. Why? NO MORE FORCED REBOOTS FOR "UPDATES", since there won't be any. How nice.

Does that mean Win10 users should just sit back and relax? Almost. If you haven't done so already, get a few cheap 512GB flash drives and back up your stuff. Then you can relax.

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Published 2025 Oct 17