Download Windows 10 Home | Microsoft.You Don’t Need a Product Key to Install and Use Windows 10
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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. 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.
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Best Home Theater Systems. One thing that I was hoping for some explanation on key activations, I have seen how some Youtuber's have tied their windows 10 keys to their Microsoft account.
Then they only need a handfull of keys, like one for each motherboard vendor, and during setup, then sign into their Microsoft account, and select the key that corresponds to the motherboard their are reviewing. So they can move the keys around, and as long as it was the same brand of motherboard it would activate for that computer, and no longer be active on the old system. Any thoughts on how this works? Any limitations on how many moves, is this method valid for years so you would never have to buy another key if you stayed with one particular favorite motherboard vendor?
On the forums, we see MANY tales of woe concerning aftermarket, 3rd-party, or otherwise dicey Windows keys. Of course, using an old version's key essentially amounts to a free upgrade, which once upon a time was often provided by software vendors, so if you can use that method, great. Any attempt to connect to www.
Sorry, not getting my business. Thanks for this article. I've been struggling with the idea of buying another copy of Windows 10 for my media machine. It's a PC built from old parts and is currently running Linux.
Has anyone had a good experience with this? Wait a sec TH is legitimizing kinquin? While they might activate today there is no guarantee they will activate a month from now or whenever you decide to reinstall windows from scratch. This article is causing multiple conniptions among the Moderation team.
There are very good reasons why, although tolerated from a couple of well-known sources like Kinguin, none of us ever encourage people to obtain keys this way.
It isn't illegal, so we don't sanction for it, but like I said, the tales of woe are too numerous to go unnoticed. At least the article makes no mention of "activators," which in most cases do represent outright piracy, not to mention the viruses and malware with which they are often laden. Discussions of those are not allowed and are deleted, and sometimes offenders knuckles get rapped with a hammer.
Yes, doing this definitely constitutes a "Do at your own risk". If money is tight, run Win 10 unlicensed, until you can a get known legit key from someone like Newegg.
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