240 Million Computers, Declared Dead by Microsoft
On October 14, 2025, Microsoft ended free security support for Windows 10. That was not a surprise. What was surprising was what it meant for the hardware.
Windows 11 requires a TPM 2.0 security chip, an 8th-generation Intel processor or newer, UEFI Secure Boot, and a handful of other specifications that most computers sold before 2018 do not have. According to Canalys, roughly 240 million PCs worldwide cannot run Windows 11. Not because they are broken. Not because they are slow. Because Microsoft drew an arbitrary hardware line and those machines are on the wrong side of it.
A computer with a 7th-gen Intel i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD is still a perfectly capable machine for web browsing, office work, email, video streaming, and light photo editing. It will handle those tasks today exactly as well as it did the day it was purchased. But Microsoft will no longer patch it, and it will not let you install the new operating system on it without workarounds.
Microsoft's official recommendation to people with these machines was to "recycle your old PC." Their email to Windows 10 users literally suggested selling it or taking it to a local recycling group. That is Microsoft telling you to throw away a working computer and buy a new one.
The scale of this: If those 240 million computers were stacked, they would make a pile taller than the distance to the moon. Canalys estimates the transition could generate over a billion pounds of electronic waste. All from machines that work fine.
What Actually Makes an Old Computer Feel Slow
Before we talk about Linux, it is worth understanding why that old laptop feels like it is dying. In most cases, it is not the hardware. It is what Windows is doing with the hardware.
Windows 10 in 2025 is not the same operating system it was in 2015. A decade of feature updates, telemetry services, background processes, and bloatware have turned it into something that demands significantly more resources than it used to. Cortana runs in the background. OneDrive syncs whether you asked it to or not. Windows Defender is constantly scanning. Search indexing chews through your disk. Dozens of services start at boot that most people never use and do not know exist.
On a machine with 4 GB of RAM, Windows 10 can use nearly half of it before you even open a browser. Open Chrome with a few tabs and you are already swapping to disk. If that disk is a spinning hard drive instead of an SSD, everything crawls. It is not the computer that is slow. It is the operating system consuming resources it does not need to consume.
This is the part that most people do not realize: the hardware did not get worse. The software got heavier. And the solution does not have to be new hardware. It can be lighter software.
What Happens When You Put Linux on That Same Machine
The first thing you notice is the quiet. Not the sound — the activity. The disk light stops flickering constantly. The fan spins down. The machine just sits there, waiting for you to do something, instead of doing fifty things on its own in the background.
A lightweight Linux distribution like MX Linux or Linux Mint XFCE uses around 400 to 600 MB of RAM at idle. Compare that to Windows 10 using 1.5 to 2 GB before you even open anything. On a machine with 4 GB of RAM, that is the difference between having room to breathe and being maxed out before you start working.
Boot times drop dramatically. A 10-year-old laptop with an SSD can boot into a full Linux desktop in under 30 seconds. With a spinning hard drive, you are still looking at under a minute in most cases. The same machine on Windows 10 might take two to three minutes to become actually usable after you see the desktop, because it is still loading services in the background.
Web browsing, which is what most people use a computer for, works exactly as well as it does on a new machine. Firefox runs the same on Linux as it does on Windows. YouTube plays fine. Google Docs works. Netflix streams. Email loads. The websites do not know or care what operating system you are using.
Office work is handled by LibreOffice, which opens Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint files. It is not identical to Microsoft Office, and complex macros or heavily formatted documents can have issues. But for the kind of document work most people do — letters, budgets, reports, simple spreadsheets — it works without any problems.
Which Linux to Use (and Why It Matters)
There are hundreds of Linux distributions. Ignore most of them. For someone putting Linux on an older computer, there are really only a few that matter, and the choice depends on how old the machine is.
If your computer is from roughly 2014 or newer (4+ GB RAM)
Linux Mint XFCE is the best starting point for someone coming from Windows. It looks familiar. The start menu is where you expect it. The file manager works the way you are used to. It comes with a web browser, office suite, media player, and image editor already installed. You can be productive within minutes of installing it. The XFCE version is lighter than Mint's standard Cinnamon edition, which means it runs faster on older hardware while still looking polished and modern.
MX Linux is what I run daily, and it is arguably the best all-around choice for older hardware. It is based on Debian, which is rock-solid stable. It includes a set of tools built specifically for managing the system without needing to touch a terminal. It still supports 32-bit machines, which most other distributions have dropped. It boots fast, runs lean, and comes with everything you need out of the box. If Linux Mint is the friendly option, MX Linux is the practical one.
If your computer is truly ancient (2 GB RAM or less)
antiX and Puppy Linux can run on machines that have no business still being turned on. We are talking about computers from 2008 or earlier, machines with 1 GB of RAM and single-core processors. These distributions are stripped down to the essentials and can run entirely from RAM, which makes even the slowest hard drive irrelevant. They are not pretty, and the learning curve is steeper, but they work.
The one hardware upgrade worth making: If your old computer still has a spinning hard drive, replacing it with even a cheap SSD (you can find 120 GB drives for under $20) will make a bigger difference than anything else. An SSD plus Linux on a 10-year-old machine will genuinely feel faster than Windows 10 on that same machine with a hard drive. It is the single best upgrade-to-cost ratio in computing.
What You Can and Cannot Do
Honesty matters here. Linux is not a perfect replacement for Windows in every scenario. It is important to know what works great, what takes some adjustment, and what does not work at all.
Works great: Web browsing, email, video streaming (Netflix, YouTube, Spotify), office documents, PDF reading and editing, photo viewing and basic editing (GIMP is free and powerful), video calls (Zoom and Google Meet work fine in the browser), file management, printing (most modern printers work without any setup).
Works with some adjustment: Syncing with iPhones (it can be done, but it is not seamless), some specific printer models, connecting to corporate VPNs, using certain professional software that has Linux alternatives but not identical replacements.
Does not work: Most Windows-only software (Microsoft Office desktop apps, Adobe Creative Suite, many accounting programs like QuickBooks desktop), most PC games that require anti-cheat software, some specialized hardware like certain drawing tablets or niche peripherals. If you depend on specific Windows software for your job, Linux may not be the right move, or you may need to keep a dual-boot setup.
For the vast majority of people who use a computer for browsing, email, documents, and media, Linux handles everything without compromise. For people with specific professional software needs, it is worth checking whether your tools have Linux versions or good alternatives before making the switch.
The Money and the Waste
A new laptop costs $400 to $800 for something decent. A Linux installation costs nothing. An SSD to speed up an old machine costs $15 to $25. The math is simple.
But it is not just about your wallet. The environmental cost of manufacturing a new laptop is staggering. It takes hundreds of kilograms of raw materials and thousands of liters of water to produce a single laptop. The mining operations for rare earth elements damage ecosystems. The shipping burns fuel. And the old machine, if it ends up in a landfill, leaches lead, mercury, cadmium, and other toxic metals into the soil and groundwater.
Extending the useful life of a computer by three to five years with Linux is one of the most impactful things an individual can do to reduce personal electronic waste. It is not a sacrifice. The machine works well. You are not settling for a worse experience. You are just using software that does not waste your hardware's capabilities.
The Real Reason to Try This
Forget the environmental argument for a second. Forget the money. The real reason to put Linux on an old computer is simpler than any of that: it feels good to use a fast computer.
That old ThinkPad in your closet, the one that takes four minutes to boot and another two minutes to open a browser? Put MX Linux or Mint on it with a cheap SSD. It will boot in 20 seconds. It will open Firefox instantly. It will not pester you with update notifications, Cortana suggestions, or OneDrive popups. It will just work, quietly, and do exactly what you tell it to do.
There is something genuinely satisfying about a machine that starts fast, runs clean, and does not fight you. It is how computers used to feel before every operating system became a platform for selling you services.
If you have an old computer that you have written off, give it a shot. Download MX Linux or Linux Mint XFCE, flash it to a USB drive with a free tool like balenaEtcher, and boot from the USB to try it without changing anything on the hard drive. If you like it, install it. If you do not, pull the USB out and nothing has changed.
You have nothing to lose except a computer you were not using anyway.
This post is part of The Switch to Linux series at Refined Web Solutions. If you are interested in making the switch and want help getting set up, or if you want a website built on the same principles — fast, lightweight, no bloat — we can help.