How do I update Windows Home to Pro?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com.
It's not uncommon for Windows, preinstalled on your new machine, to be a home edition.
It's also not uncommon to miss some of the tools that are available
for the Pro Edition, like Remote Desktop or
the Group Policy Editor or a couple of other random things.
Fortunately, you can upgrade Home to Pro in place without losing anything.
It's not a really major deal.
The only problem is and I'm going to say this right up front, this is not free.
I'm not going to show you some kind
of a hack that lets you go from Home to Pro for free.
It's a paid update.
What you'll have to do is purchase Windows Pro, be it Windows Ten or Windows Eleven.
Purchase a product key for the Pro edition of the operating system you have,
and then you'll be able to enter it and the upgrade will be automatic.
Let me show you exactly how that works by doing it on one of my machines.
What we're looking at right now is a Windows Ten Home machine.
You can see that it is Windows Ten Home,
the latest version of Windows Ten, but it's the Home edition.
So what we really want is the Pro Edition.
I know that like I said, there are tools in there that I rely on all the time.
The magic is exactly this.
Changing the product key or upgrade your addition of Windows.
Now to upgrade, you can go to the store to buy the upgrade.
I will actually show you what the store looks like because
this may be the most expeditious path for you to get the update.
Unfortunately, it's also often the more expensive path.
For example, you'll see here in the United States
version of the store, I would be charged $99.
My belief is that you can probably get it
elsewhere cheaper. If you're getting it for like $10 or $15 run away.
I mean, it's not that cheap.
Those are typically stolen or OEM or otherwise Invalid product keys that can
actually cause problems if you end up using them and installing them.
So make sure when you get a product key that it'd be something legitimate.
Having said that, I already have my product key available.
So what I'm going to do is simply change the product key.
Click on that and I will enter
in a product key that I happen to have purchased.
And yes, that's a little bit of painful
typing, but sometimes that's what you need to do.
I'll hit Next,
it's validating the key.
And this tells me that, in fact,
I have entered a key that will update or upgrade this edition of Windows.
And I'll click on Start. Now.
The interesting thing about the upgrade
process is that it's very much like taking a Windows Update.
What's happening right now is
that Windows Update is fetching from Microsoft the various files
and components that are required, that are added to windows Ten home to make it pro
or that are replaced in Windows Ten home to make it pro.
This can take a little bit of time as it indicates.
In fact it'll probably reboot a time or
two so what I'm going to do is let this run.
We'll fast forward through it.
I'll come back to you at the end.
And we're back.
Now you'll notice that I ended up having to re sign in to my Microsoft account.
That was unexpected.
I actually expected this to be a little
bit more transparent than that but nonetheless that works just fine.
The account was still there and it's running the initial, what they
call, out of box experience which is also not unexpected.
This is the kind of stuff that happens when you log into a machine with a new
account for the first time or apparently after some forms of system
update Privacy settings on this one I'm going to go completely default.
This is a virtual machine and here we are.
We are now in windows ten and if we take
a look at the system dialog we will see that this is now Windows Ten Pro
21H2. In other words, 2021 the second half of the year is
the most recent feature update that's available at the time.
I record this and it's what's installed
so that's really all it boils down to: purchasing or otherwise acquiring
a Windows Ten Pro license key installing it in your Windows Ten home machine
and the upgrade will just happen and nothing will be lost. And again this
applies to both Windows 10 and Windows 11.
For updates for related links, for comments and more,
visit askleo.com/144213. I'm Leo Notenboom and this is askleo.com.