Windows 10


 * ''This article is about the operating system series developed since 2014. See Windows 10 (original release) for the original operating system release called "Windows 10".

Windows 10 is a series of Microsoft Windows operating systems, initially released in July 2015 after being announced in September 2014. It succeeded Windows 8.1 and was ultimately superseded by Windows 11 on 5 October 2021.

This is the first version of Microsoft Windows to not include MS-DOS in any form as the ability to create MS-DOS 8.00 startup disks has been removed. It is also the first version of Microsoft Windows to not have support for Windows Media Center as Microsoft decided to discontinue the app due to decreased usage.

This is the last version of Microsoft Windows to support the IA-32 architecture (32-bit x86 systems) as Windows 11 requires an x86-64 processor with CMPXCHG16b, PrefetchW and LAHF/SAHF instructions. This is the last version of Microsoft Windows to have NTVDM to run 16-bit apps.

Windows as a service
With Windows 10, Microsoft introduced a new release model called Windows as a service. Instead of releasing a major version of Windows every few years, the company instead vowed to release smaller updates to Windows 10 multiple times a year. These updates, labeled feature updates to differentiate them from regular bugfixes, are major updates to the operating system that add new features to the operating system. Usually, they are a new build of the operating system released after one or more development cycles. However, on multiple occasions, a limited set of new features has been released as a cumulative update and labeled as a new Windows 10 feature update.

Originally, feature updates were released twice in a year, with the first feature update being released in spring and the other in autumn. 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.