Take advantage of Microsoft’s new hardware requirements
Microsoft will end general support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, and their use of the POPCNT CPU instruction set in upcoming Windows 11 patches means that older computers will no longer be able to boot once the update rolls out. This means large enterprises will need to spend a lot of money updating their aging computer fleets if they want to continue running Windows securely.
Alphabet is taking advantage of this decision and offering a free way to migrate these computers to ChromeOS Flex instead of replacing them. Not only does this save companies money on purchasing modern hardware for their employees, but it also prevents these machines from ending up in landfills. It’s an interesting way to try to get a relatively unpopular operating system onto a large number of machines and take advantage of the current push by large enterprises to at least appear to be adopting green initiatives.
While we can’t live with the same old hardware forever, and anyone with a job to do should own a computer that was manufactured sometime in the last decade, suddenly a lot of hardware is thrown into the trash because they no longer receive security updates in question .