About this site
Your PC is fine. We’re here to tell you what’s actually true.
Perfectly Good PC is an independent guide for people being told to throw away a computer that works. We started it because the internet’s coverage of the Windows 10 end-of-life is a mess — three superseded dates circulating at once, countdown timers built on stale facts, and a great deal of advice written by people who profit from you buying a new machine.
Why this site exists
Microsoft extended consumer Windows 10 security updates to 12 October 2027, and most of the web hasn’t caught up. Meanwhile the Windows 10 share of desktops went up through the first half of 2026 — people are actively choosing to stay on machines that do everything they need.
Those people are badly served. The upgrade prompts don’t explain the free option. The countdown sites are running dead dates. The Linux enthusiasts skip the part where your printer stops working, and the refurbished-PC affiliates would rather you didn’t know about any of it. What was missing was a plain, current, sourced answer — and working tools instead of a red X.
Our three commitments
We tell you the free option first
Extended Security Updates are free for most people and run to October 2027. Leading with that costs us affiliate revenue and buys the only thing that matters: being believed. It’s also simply true.
We say who should not switch
Macro-heavy Excel, Adobe professionals, QuickBooks Desktop, CAD users, competitive gamers, anyone on Windows-only vertical software. Every migration guide here opens with who shouldn’t read it.
We never manufacture urgency
No countdown pressure, no implication that you must buy hardware, no burying the free option under a purchase link. If the honest answer is “do nothing for another year”, that’s the answer you get.
How the guides are researched
Every factual claim on this site traces to a primary source — Microsoft’s own documentation, distribution vendors, hardware databases, or measured market data — recorded in a research corpus before it ever reaches a page. Nothing gets written from memory or from another blog’s summary.
The volatile facts are on a re-check schedule. The October 2027 date has already moved twice, so we re-verify it monthly along with ESU pricing, hardware prices during the memory shortage, distro releases, and driver support. Every page shows when it was last verified, and where a fact is genuinely uncertain we say so in the text rather than rounding it to confidence.
We correct the popular wrong answers, with sources, because those corrections are the most useful thing we can publish: the Steam Linux share that was a one-month peak, the Apple trade-in credit that doesn’t exist, the “NVIDIA on Linux is fine now” claim that is least true for exactly the 2015–2018 cards our readers own.
The tools
Three interactive tools do the work a static article can’t: the path finder (which of the four paths fits you), the ESU eligibility checker (can you enroll, and by the cheapest route — the rules are region-dependent and genuinely confusing), and the Linux hardware checker (will your graphics, Wi-Fi and printer actually work).
All three run entirely in your browser. There is no email gate, no signup, and no server receiving your answers — see the privacy policy. Every possible outcome is tested exhaustively before release, because a tool that quietly gives one person the wrong answer would make this whole site dishonest.
How we’re funded
This site is funded by affiliate commissions on a small number of upgrade parts — mainly SSDs and RAM — through retailer programs including the Amazon Associates Program. If you buy after clicking one of those links, we earn a small fee at no extra cost to you.
That is the only affiliate category that fits our advice: “keep your PC” and “here’s the upgrade that makes it fast again” are the same sentence. We deliberately carry no links to replacement PCs, because recommending you replace a working computer is the exact thing this site exists to argue against.
There is no display advertising, no sponsored content, and no paid placement. Nobody pays to appear in a recommendation, and every affiliate link is visibly marked where it appears.
Who we are
Perfectly Good PC is an independent publication, not a corporate blog and not a content farm. It has no relationship with Microsoft, Apple, Canonical, or any hardware manufacturer or retailer mentioned in these pages, and none of them has any say in what we publish.
We’d rather be right than first, and we’d rather be corrected than wrong. If something here is out of date or simply mistaken, tell us and we’ll fix it and note the change: [email protected].