Microsoft will happily take 1,000 Rewards points instead of $30 for Windows 10 Extended Security Updates, which is a decent trade if you’ve been searching on Bing for years without ever spending the points. Plenty of people have a balance sitting there they’ve completely forgotten about.
The catch, and it’s the reason most people give up and pay is that you can’t enroll in Windows 10 ESU using 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points instead of paying $30 from the Rewards website. There’s no button for it there and there never was. The only place the redemption exists is inside a wizard buried in Windows Update on the PC you want to cover.
Where the option is actually hiding
On the Windows 10 machine itself, open Settings, then Update & Security, then Windows Update. If your PC qualifies you’ll see a message about enrolling in Extended Security Updates with an Enroll now link sitting under it.
Click that and a small window opens with three choices. Back up your PC settings with Windows Backup, redeem 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or pay the $30. Tick the Rewards option, hit Next, confirm the redemption on the screen that follows, and you’re done in about fifteen seconds. Windows Update then starts delivering security patches again the way it used to.
That’s genuinely all there is to it. The difficulty was never the process, it’s that nobody tells you the redemption lives inside Windows rather than on the Rewards dashboard, so people go hunting on rewards.bing.com, find nothing, and assume the offer was withdrawn.
Things to sort out before you go looking
If the Enroll now link isn’t there, one of these is usually why.
- Your PC has to be on Windows 10 version 22H2 with the recent updates installed. Anything older simply won’t be offered the option, and a lot of machines that have been left alone for a year or two are stuck on an earlier build without their owner realising.
- You need to be signed into Windows with a Microsoft account, not a local one. If you’re on a local account the wizard will stop and ask you to sign in before it lets you continue.
- The account needs administrator rights on that PC.
- Work machines joined to a domain or managed through MDM are excluded from the consumer programme completely. Those fall under the business version, which costs $61 per device per year and gets dearer each year after that.
Check your point balance separately at rewards.bing.com before you start, just so you’re not clicking through the wizard hoping. You need the full 1,000 available.
Getting to 1,000 if you’re starting from nothing
Here’s where expectations need managing. When The Register looked into this, one of their writers signed into a Hotmail account he’d had since roughly 1996 and found 341 points waiting. Nearly three decades of casual use, not even a third of the way there.
Points come from searching on Bing, completing the daily activity sets on the Rewards dashboard, using Edge, shopping in the Microsoft Store and playing on Xbox. Daily earning caps vary quite a bit by country and by your membership level, so rather than trust any number you read in a guide, open your own dashboard and look at what it says your daily limits are.
Realistically, if you’re starting from zero and doing the daily sets plus your normal searching, you’re looking at a couple of weeks to reach 1,000. Not terrible. But if the ESU deadline were next week you’d be better off taking the free Windows Backup route than trying to grind points in time.
And do not use a VPN to pretend you’re in another country to boost your earning. People get their Rewards accounts banned for exactly that, and you’d lose whatever balance you’d already built.
The honest question: should you even bother?
All three enrollment routes get you exactly the same thing, which is critical and important security patches through 12 October 2027 after Microsoft quietly extended the programme by a year in June. Same updates, same end date, whether you paid $30, spent points, or ticked the free backup box.
So the Rewards route is really only worth it for one specific type of person: someone who doesn’t want their settings and credentials syncing to OneDrive, and who happens to already have the points. If you don’t mind the backup option, take it. It costs nothing, it takes less time than earning points, and having a backup of your settings is useful in its own right when you eventually do move to a new machine.
The one genuinely good reason to prefer points over the free route is that Windows Backup is Microsoft nudging you toward OneDrive, and the storage you get free fills up fast. Spending points sidesteps that entirely without spending money.
Whichever you pick, one enrollment covers up to ten devices on the same Microsoft account. Worth knowing if you’ve got a couple of old laptops in the house or you’re running a small office on aging hardware, because you’re not doing this ten separate times.
Why $30 is the worst option from here
Thirty dollars doesn’t sound like much until you try to actually pay it from Nigeria.
Card limits on international spending, failed transactions, the exchange rate on the day, and the general hassle of getting a dollar payment through to a foreign service all apply here the same way they do everywhere else. It’s the same friction that made paying for ChatGPT locally such a headache once VAT entered the picture, and the reason PayPal’s return to the market got such a lukewarm reception. People here have spent years working around payment barriers and are not enthusiastic about adding another one.
Points and the backup option both dodge that completely. Neither one touches your card. For a Nigerian reader that’s not a minor convenience, it’s the difference between getting enrolled today and putting it off for three months.
The good news on the Rewards side is that Nigeria is on Microsoft’s official list of supported Rewards regions, so this isn’t one of those features you read about and then discover isn’t offered here. Just be aware that redemption catalogues and some earning methods differ by market, so your dashboard may not look identical to the screenshots in American guides.
If the Enroll now link never shows up
Run through the requirements above again first, because 22H2 catches more people than anything else. Install every pending update, restart, and check Windows Update again.
If it’s still missing, there’s a harder possibility to consider. ESU enrollment isn’t offered in every market, and users in some regions have reported the option simply never appearing on eligible hardware. Microsoft rolled the wizard out in phases and coverage has never been completely uniform.
Either way, don’t put it off on the assumption you’ve got until 2027. Running an unpatched Windows machine is a genuinely bad idea given how many people got hit last year, and the two free routes take about a minute each. Sort it out on a Saturday morning and forget about it for another year.
