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How to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Pro for free | ZDNet

Your upgrade is now a digital license, attached to your unique hardware. If you perform a reinstallation of Windows, Microsoft’s activation servers will recognize the hardware and activate Windows 10 automatically. I have tested this scenario multiple times on hardware that originally shipped with Windows Home and was upgraded to Windows 10 Pro.
After the upgrade was complete, I used a bootable USB flash drive containing Windows 10 setup files to reinstall a clean copy of Windows 10 Pro, skipping the option to enter a product key as part of setup, as shown below. When prompted, be sure to choose Windows 10 Pro as the edition to install.
The system was properly activated, because Microsoft’s servers recognized the hardware and used the digital license. Looking for technical information about Windows 10 releases, new features, known issues, troubleshooting, and tech support? Start here. The one gotcha in this series of scenarios comes when you have a system that includes digital licenses for both Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro. In that scenario, you can inadvertently restore Windows 10 Home.
This happened recently when I used a recovery image to reinstall Windows 10 on a Surface Pro PC that had originally shipped with Windows 10 Home and had been upgraded to Windows 10 Pro. Not surprisingly, using the recovery image gave me an installation of Windows 10 Home. If that happens to you, don’t bother searching for the product key you used to upgrade. Instead, use Microsoft’s generic product key to force the upgrade. Next, enter the default Windows 10 Pro product key:.
Follow the prompts to upgrade from Home to Pro. Because your hardware already has a digital license for the Pro edition, it will activate automatically. That generic product key isn’t magical, of course. If your hardware doesn’t already have a Pro license, you’ll get an activation error and you’ll need to supply a proper product key or pay for an upgrade.
Under Upgrade your edition of Windows , select Change product key. Under Upgrade your edition of Windows , select Go to the Store.
Table of contents. Activation Overview. Install and Upgrades. Activation Troubleshooting. Windows 11 Windows 10 More Open Activation settings Important: The following steps apply only to devices currently running an activated copy of Windows 11 Home. Open Activation settings Important: The following steps apply only to devices currently running an activated copy of Windows 10 Home.
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We just got don Good afternoon and welcome to today’s briefing. Hope you are starting to enjoy the warmer weather up in the north it has been pretty awesome. That said Security doesn’t sleep and so do we have to keep our systems and our knowledge up to date. We have some Online Events. Log in Join. Home Windows Windows 10 Update to windows 10 pro installed Enterprise instead – now i’m not activated?
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Windows 10 home upgrade to enterprise instead of pro free.Upgrade Windows 10 from Home to Pro Edition for Free
System Requirements for Windows 10 Enterprise — If you want to upgrade your operating system to Windows 10 on your PC or tablet, you will need minimum hardware. In this short post you will get to know about the system requirements for Windows 10 Enterprise Edition. Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Enterprise users will have the ability to postpone updates. The amount of time that Windows 10 Pro users can postpone updates is limited. Windows will uninstall your application and enable Windows Defender if your antimalware subscription is not active.
This may be made available to rest of the countries very soon. Few additional requirements :- 1 The upgrade-ability of a device has factors beyond the system specification. This includes driver and firmware support, application compatibility, and feature support, regardless of whether or not the device meets the minimum system specification for Windows If you are planning to upgrade your operating system to Windows 10 then the good news is Microsoft offers upgrading like-to-like editions of Windows.
Lastly I want to mention that every Windows product has a lifecycle. Read more. You can get these features without reinstalling Windows, and without even having an Enterprise disc. Why not just buy a product key for Windows 10 Enterprise?
While Microsoft offers paid upgrades to Windows 10 Professional, the Enterprise and Education editions of Windows 10 are only available through volume licensing channels. To upgrade, you just need a key. These publicly-available keys are normally used in organizations with Key Management Servers. Update: Note that you cannot upgrade from Windows 10 Home directly to Windows 10 Enterprise with this method. However, you can upgrade from Windows 10 Professional to Windows 10 Enterprise, and you can also upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Professional.
If you have a Windows 10 virtual machine or secondary computer you want to test these Enterprise features on, this is an excellent solution. This works even better if you do have a legitimate Windows 10 Enterprise product key through a business. Enter a legitimate product key and Windows 10 will upgrade to the Enterprise edition and become properly activated. This is a convenient solution for businesses, which can purchase computers that come with Home or Professional editions of Windows 10 and upgrade them without a reinstall.
If you have a legitimate Windows 10 Enterprise product key, you can enter it now. You may not want to do this on your primary Windows system. Windows 10 will reboot when the process is done. This process took us less than 20 minutes, even in a slower virtual machine. All the Enterprise-only features will be available on your PC. However, if you used a KMS key, your system will no longer be activated and Windows 10 will begin to inform you of this. Does Microsoft have a problem with this this?
Quite often users and administrators ask if they can upgrade a lower Windows 10 edition like Home or Pro to a higher one for example, Pro or Enterprise respectively. In our example, it is Windows 10 Pro.
In order to upgrade your Windows 10 edition from Professional to Enterprise, you must enter a valid product key. It is not very convenient. Then just activate Windows online or on your KMS server.
In the same way, you can upgrade your Windows 10 Home to Pro without any data loss or app reinstallation. You may use one of the following options:. How not to activate windows The education tenant must have an active subscription to microsoft with a windows 10 enterprise license or a windows 10 enterprise or education subscription. How to activate windows 10 enterprise. Finally click on activate.
In order to manually activate windows 10 enterprise you need to follow the following steps. Here we ll introduce how to activate windows enterprise edition with cmd.
Using kms key management service way 1. To do so open an elevated command prompt as follows. If that doesn t work click on e z activator. And at the very bottom will show if windows is activated. From windows 10 version the device will automatically activate windows 10 enterprise using the firmware embedded activation key. You can confirm this information in settings update security activation. There are two main ways to activate windows 10 enterprise which are as following.
If the device is running windows 10 version or then windows 10 pro must be successfully activated in settings update security activation as illustrated in figure 7a. You can press windows r key on the keyboard to open windows run box.
Open up the command prompt with the administrative permission. Click on product keys tab and select the product and edition e g windows 10 professional. Your windows will be activated immediately. A device with a windows 10 pro education digital license. This will open the windows activation dialog box. Type cmd and press ctrl shift enter to open and run windows command prompt as administrator. Now go to the activation tab select kms server service and click install.
If you want to perform clean install,you may have to wait for couple of days i. There are third party tools also available ,its upto you. You can reach to windows updates window using the simple syntax which you can perform on RUN command : ms-settings:windowsupdate. From your media ,copy the install. From above,you can choose which edition you want the WIM file to be converted either enterprise or Education or home if available. Now we will change the Image from pro to Enterprise using.
The latest version when I set that up was Version and features like Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 and PowerToys Run are only available for versions and later.
The general advice would be to backup and reinstall. And I would have done that to be honest but a quick Google search will take you to a Microsoft Community thread where apparently, if you change a few registry values, things should start working…. Windows 10 is available in a variety of editions targeting different markets and user needs. The three most popular editions are Windows 10 Home, Pro, and Enterprise. During the free upgrade offer, Microsoft made it known Windows 10 will be free to every PC or device running a genuine version of Windows 7 or Windows 8.
Your system was upgraded to the logical edition. But you might want or need some of the richer capabilities available in the Pro version. For this, you will need to purchase the Windows 10 Pro Pack. Or use an existing Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise key. A volume license is a convenient way for large businesses to purchase Windows licenses in bulk. Then deploy it to all computers in the organization. So for example, if your company is running Windows 10 Enterprise edition and you are running Windows 10 Home on your personal laptop, you can easily upgrade.
This is important for ease of use, management, and support rights that guarantee all systems are standardized and are protected using the benefits that are available with that particular edition.
Of course, the same procedures apply if you want to upgrade Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro using either a retail Windows 10 Pro license or Pro Pack key.
Please note, Easy Upgrade will preserve your personal files, applications, and settings, it simply unlocks the edition, the process is quite similar to the Windows Anytime Upgrade in Windows 7. Enter your product key for the edition you are upgrading to, whether it is Pro or Enterprise.
Then wait while the product key verified. Make sure all open applications are closed and your work is saved then start the upgrade. Wait while the upgrade process kicks off.
Your computer will be restarted several times throughout this process. The amount of time the upgrade takes will vary between systems. But in my experience, it only took 5 to 10 minutes. Closeout of the upgrade complete verification screen and start using your new edition of Windows.
If you decide you need to transfer your Windows 10 Pro Pack license to another computer in the future, check outour article for instructions on how to do so. In-place upgrade is the preferred method to use when migrating from Windows 10 to a later release of Windows 10, and is also a preferred method for upgrading from Windows 7 or 8. MDT includes an in-place upgrade task sequence template that makes the process really simple. In-place upgrade differs from computer refresh in that you cannot use a custom image to perform the in-place upgrade.
In this article we will add a default Windows 10 image to the production deployment share specifically to perform an in-place upgrade. For details about the setup for the procedures in this article, please see Prepare for deployment with MDT. If you have already completed all the steps in Deploy a Windows 10 image using MDT, then you already have a production deployment share and you can skip to Add Windows 10 Enterprise x64 full source.
To initiate the in-place upgrade, perform the following steps on PC the device to be upgraded. Close Menu. System Requirements for Windows 10 Enterprise Windows 10 Enterprise works great on the same hardware that powers Windows 8. Upgrade Editions If you are planning to upgrade your operating system to Windows 10 then the good news is Microsoft offers upgrading like-to-like editions of Windows.
Windows 10 edition upgrade (Windows 10) – Windows Deployment | Microsoft Docs
In fact, you can use a product key from any of these older Windows versions to perform a clean install or to upgrade to Pro. It’s worth rummaging through your garage, storeroom, or email archives to see if you can locate one of those old keys. Maybe you still have a key for one of the heavily discounted upgrades to Windows 8 Pro that Microsoft offered in the first few months after that product’s ill-fated launch in Or perhaps you have a shrink-wrapped retail copy of Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate, where the license associated with the product key is no longer in use.
Best of all, you only need to use the older product key one time. After you complete the upgrade from Windows 10 Home, the Windows 10 Pro digital license is attached to the specific hardware you just upgraded, allowing you to reinstall that edition of Windows on that hardware anytime, without the need for a product key.
This scenario worked during the early Windows 10 upgrade program, and after some testing and multiple reports from independent testers worldwide I can confirm that it still succeeds in , more than five years later. Microsoft first made this option available in Windows 10 version Since then, they have simplified the process dramatically.
Here’s the scoop. Some vendors offer an upgrade option as part of the purchase, but many PCs sold in the retail channel are preloaded with Home edition. This could also be the case if you took advantage of the free Windows 10 upgrade offer on a PC running a Home edition of Windows 7 or Windows 8. In either case, the upgrade takes just a few minutes.
You’ll see a succession of progress screens and your system will restart. After the upgrade completes, you should see a Success notification.
Check the Activation screen again to confirm that you’re now running Windows 10 Pro. After you’ve successfully performed a Home-to-Pro upgrade, you can file that product key away. Your upgrade is now a digital license, attached to your unique hardware. If you perform a reinstallation of Windows, Microsoft’s activation servers will recognize the hardware and activate Windows 10 automatically.
At the top of the Activation page, you see your edition: either Home or Pro. Open Activation settings. Important: The following steps apply only to devices currently running an activated copy of Windows 11 Home. For more info, see Activate Windows. First, check if you have a Windows Pro product key.
For more info, see Find your Windows product key. Then, follow the steps that apply to your product key scenario. Select Change product key , and then enter the character Windows 11 Pro product key. Under Upgrade your edition of Windows , select Open Store. Get help with Windows activation errors. Activate Windows. Important: The following steps apply only to devices currently running an activated copy of Windows 10 Home. Under Upgrade your edition of Windows , select Change product key.
Under Upgrade your edition of Windows , select Go to the Store. Here you may try EaseUS partition manager software for help:. Step 3. In the Check File System window, check the “Try to fix errors if found” option. Here is a list of the best data recovery software for Windows and Mac users. Use data recovery software to retrieve deleted or lost data quickly. In order to avoid data loss issue or system revert issue, it’s highly recommended for you to backup Windows 10 system and data before upgrade to Windows 10 Pro edition.
After Step 1 and Step 2, you can now upgrade Windows 10 from Home to Pro edition with either method offered below. Open Windows Store, log in with your Microsoft Account, click on your account icon and select Download and Updates ; 2. After the update, search Windows 10 in the search box and click on it; 4. After this, click Install to upgrade your Windows 10 from Home to Pro edition. Click Yes, let’s go to confirm the upgrade process. Usually, it would be activated.