Windows 10

This article is about the operating system series developed since 2014. For the original operating system release called "Windows 10", see Windows 10 (original release).

Windows 10 is a series of Microsoft Windows operating systems, first introduced in July 2015 after being announced in September 2014. It is the tenth overall major release in the Windows NT operating system line. It succeeded Windows 8.1 and was ultimately superseded by Windows 11 in October 2021. As of April2023, operating systems from the series run on 73.48% of Windows devices. Windows 10 is the last version to support upgrade paths from Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

A new release model called Windows as a service was introduced with smaller and regular feature updates, as opposed to releasing a major version of Windows every few years. Usually, these updates are a new build of the operating system, although in a few cases Microsoft released feature updates consisting of a limited set of new functionality using the regular cumulative update infrastructure. From 2017 till 2021, feature updates were released twice in a year, with the first feature update being released in April-May and the other in October-November. The schedule was realigned in 2021 in that feature updates for Windows 10 would be released annually in order to be consistent with Windows 11's new release cadence.

The Windows Insider Program was also introduced with Windows 10, which boosted the company's engagement with beta testers as well as distributed new pre-release builds more frequently than the prior beta testing initiatives. This also greatly cut down the number of leaks from within the company, which in the past bothered the company due to legal complications of contracted features becoming available earlier than anticipated. However, while early Insider builds often contained some clearly unfinished features and did not attempt to hide them, the Windows team has gradually moved towards locking such features down using systems such as Velocity and only unlocking them in an almost finished state.

The Windows 10 series is the last to run on 32-bit x86 systems, as support for these has been ultimately removed with the original release of Windows 11. It is also the last to support the legacy PC/AT BIOS firmware even on 64-bit systems as Windows 11 now requires UEFI firmware with Secure Boot support, which has been a part of Microsoft requirements for newly designed devices since Windows 8.