What is meant with: "Windows 10 Pro 64 WE (EN/FR/DE/NL/IT)" ?

MikeMecanic · 21 Jul 2018

Kari said:

No. You can select the language when booting the laptop up first time, but that selection cannot be changed anymore. Even factory recovery thereafter only restores the factory state in selected language.

I have had laptops and desktops like that most of my life, coming from a bilingual country FInland (official languages Finnish and Swedish). Regardless of the manufacturer, commom practise nowadays is to let user to choose device language at first boot, before OOBE starts and first user account will be created. In Finland this selection usually also contains English, in addition to Finnish and Swedish.

When a new machine is then booted first time, it asks new owner about the language. User selects one language, and from that moment the selected language cannot be changed. BIOS / UEFI settings will be in selected language (subject to manufacturer having localized BIOS / UEFI settings page), and recovery partition will be set to recover Windows in selected language.

If user then decides to do factory recovery, language selection is no longer shown and WIndows will be restored in language originally selected.

SInce a few years, I've been happy to notice that also here in my adopted home country Germany some manufactures have started to offer the same. I am writing this on a relatively new HP ProBook 470 G5 laptop, which when I booted it up first time asked if I want to set it up in German or in English. I selected English and have done one factory recovery since that, and can confirm that recovery did not ask about the language but was done in English, the language I had originally selected.

If your language is English, you should select English operating system. If you select that WE version, you must in any case select Windows setup language when booting laptop up first time. You cannot change selection in the future, except of course using language packs to change Windows display language.

Never heard about a manufacturer to sell their machines to private customers on their online store equipped with W10 Enterprise, a Windows SKU that can only be activated through volume licensing.

Exactly.

Kari

Very good answer! For a clean install, changing original language most be tweak.

Not easy to get rid of first choice.

tfwul · 22 Jul 2018

@Kari
Many thanks indeed for your elaborate reply!

All clear. Indeed, I guess selecting the English version of Windows will be the best option.
It is whilst checking out the Lenovo P52 that I stumbled over this Windows selection matter.

Your ProBook is a business type laptop as well. Assume it came with a pre-installed Windows?

Questions:
guess the Windows media (CD, or USB) was not provided? (OEM Pre-installed)
and
what if you wish to do a complete fresh Windows install, with formatting the drive, etc., i.e. similar to desktop.
(using the media creation tool)

I have an unused, full retail Windows 10 x64 Pro EN (still shrink wrapped) here, so, probably, when a fresh install, similar to the a desktop PC, isn't really possible because OEM media is not provided, then I might as well install that retail version.

Thanks again!

cereberus · 22 Jul 2018

tfwul said:

@Kari
Many thanks indeed for your elaborate reply!

All clear. Indeed, I guess selecting the English version of Windows will be the best option.
It is whilst checking out the Lenovo P52 that I stumbled over this Windows selection matter.

Your ProBook is a business type laptop as well. Assume it came with a pre-installed Windows?

Questions:
guess the Windows media (CD, or USB) was not provided? (OEM Pre-installed)
and
what if you wish to do a complete fresh Windows install, with formatting the drive, etc., i.e. similar to desktop.
(using the media creation tool)

I have an unused, full retail Windows 10 x64 Pro EN (still shrink wrapped) here, so, probably, when a fresh install, similar to the a desktop PC, isn't really possible because OEM media is not provided, then I might as well install that retail version.

Thanks again!

The only difference between oem media and your retail disk, is that the retail disk does not come with added vendor crapware.

I would not use the disk unless it is for version 1803. You can just create an installation flash drive with latest verson using the official MS media creation tool.

tfwul · 22 Jul 2018

cereberus said:

I would not use the disk unless it is for version 1803. You can just create an installation flash drive with latest verson using the official MS media creation tool.

Yes .. of course ...

Kari · 22 Jul 2018

tfwul said:

Your ProBook is a business type laptop as well. Assume it came with a pre-installed Windows?

Yes. Windows 10 Pro edition, and with, as I mentioned, language selection English <> German at first boot.

tfwul said:

Questions:
guess the Windows media (CD, or USB) was not provided? (OEM Pre-installed)
and
what if you wish to do a complete fresh Windows install, with formatting the drive, etc., i.e. similar to desktop.
(using the media creation tool)

No recovery DVD was provided, simply because the ProBook laptop doesn't even have a CD/DVD drive. Recovery partition was preset, I did one factory recovery from it.

Since that, I have completely wiped the 128 GB system SSD disk and 1 TB HDD clean, and deployed my own custom Windows 10 image. Main reasons for this are A) to get rid of all third party applications and trials included in HP's factory image, and B) to get both disks configured as I'd prefer:

What is meant with: "Windows 10 Pro 64 WE (EN/FR/DE/NL/IT)" ?-image.png

Because the factory recovery partition preset by HP is and was completely useless and unnecessary to me, wiping the disks was the most logical thing to do to get rid of absolutely everything and start from scratch. If / when I want to, I can always create my own, custom "factory recovery" partition (tutorial).

Since November 2015 and W10 version 1511, we've had a digital licensing system in place. This means that once Windows 10 on a new computer has been activated once, it remains activated even after a fresh, clean install as long as you do not change certain hardware components like CPU, motherboard and / or processor (digital license is based on a hash value calculated independendly for each device and its hardware setup).

What digital license means to you is that you, if you so prefer, can safely totally wipe hard disk / SSD clean, download Windows 10 ISO and create a USB install media, then clean install the same edition computer came shipped with. As soon as Windows Setup has finished the installation and you enter desktop, Windows will be automatically activated, subject to computer having access to Internet and Microsoft's digital licensing servers.

Kari

tfwul · 22 Jul 2018

Windows 10 comes on a USB thumb drive, your ProBook has a 3.1 USB port, AFAIK.

Frankly, I have to confess that am not familiar with a "digital license". So far I have been using DVD and with my current Windows Pro I have used Windows on USB. The spare, unused one Windows, is also a USB version.
If at all I will be using that spare one, I will first create a USB installer (Media Creation Tool) and then use that together with the license key of the spare Windows version.
Is that then considered to be a digital license?

Meanwhile, since you installed Windows, have you performed a major upgrade? (like 1709->1803)
I notice that Windows is installed on 'DISK 1'.
For good order's sake: I take it that you are aware that this may run into issues when performing a major update: Windows is expected to be located on 'DISK 0'. I've been running into issues because of that (had to disable DISK 1 in BIOS).

Kari · 22 Jul 2018

tfwul said:

Meanwhile, since you installed Windows, have you performed a major upgrade? (like 1709->1803)

I am running Windows Insider builds, currently a preview build for next Windows version 1809 build 17711. Most recent build is 17713 but I had to revert back to 17711 because of recovery bug in 17713.

I upgrade about twice a month without issues, every time new Insider build is released.

tfwul said:

I notice that Windows is installed on 'DISK 1'.
For good order's sake: I take it that you are aware that this may run into issues when performing a major update: Windows is expected to be located on 'DISK 0'. I've been running into issues because of that (had to disable DISK 1 in BIOS).

LOL yes, I have heard that utterly nonsense supersticious claim quite often. It is of course totally false, having no factual base. Windows installs without issues on any internal disk, and works perfectly regardless on which disk it resides.

These "I think that ..." and "I've heard that ..." rumours are mostly based on wrong conclusions and beliefs without any real facts backing them. Take for instance relocating the Users folder; since days of Vista, I have used Sysprep to move the Users folder completely away from drive where Windows is located (tutorial):

(Click to enlarge.)

In my case, all user profiles are on E: partition:

According to even some respected IT writers, this causes update and upgrade issues. All articles suggesting it causes issues I have seen are based on outdated, no longer valid information and beliefs. I am still waiting to see first issue caused by relocated Users folder, never having had any update, upgrade or other issues because of my unconventional disk configuration.

Of course with this HP laptop, there's a really good reason to move Users folder to another disk. The laptop comes with so called hybrid disk, a small 128 GB M.2 SSD, and a bigger 1 TB HDD. I naturally want to use the SSD for Windows, but it is simply too small to store my user profiles, or most of the software I need and want to install. Therefore I leave it only for Windows, installing my software on HDD partition D:, and relocate Users folder to E: partition. All new user accounts will be created automatically on E:\Users instead of C:\Users.

Kari

tfwul · 22 Jul 2018

Well... you know, I personally experienced that this DISK 1 and DISK 0 thing does play a role.

Really. No way I could install the update.
Even when having formatted the SSD (on DISK1). It took me days ... and I don't know how many attempts. All attempts ended up with a BSOD.
There is a lengthy thread on it, see: 1709 Fails to install and how to remove multiple recovery partitions?

Anyway, I was left with the question: if Windows can't be installed on a formatted drive, then what..?

I got the hint about Windows having to be installed on DISK 0 (it seems Microsoft changed their internal disk numbering scheme from 1-9 to 0-9).

So disabled DISK 1 in BIOS, being a HDD, i.e. same setup as yours. After reboot DISK 1 (SSD) changed to DISK 0.
Update went flawlessly then...

Re-enabling DISK 1 in BIOS after update and everything was back to normal.
Note: I am not talking about the 'minor updates', and maybe the insider updates work different as well, but the major ones for the public.

Kari · 22 Jul 2018

tfwul said:

Re-enabling DISK 1 in BIOS after update and everything was back to normal.
Note: I am not talking about the 'minor updates', and maybe the insider updates work different as well, but the major ones for the public.

I got the hint about Windows having to be installed on DISK 0 (it seems Microsoft changed their internal disk numbering scheme from 1-9 to 0-9).

First, Insider build upgrades are full feature upgrades, exactly the same as for instance upgrading from Windows 10 version 1709 to 1803. No difference at all.

As far as I know, Microsoft has not changed disk numbering. First HDD has always been Disk 0, second Disk 1 and so on.

This I want to make very clear for future readers of this thread: Windows can be installed on any internal disk. It is completely, profoundly irrelevant which disk you select to install Windows.

In your case, the update / upgrade issues simply had some other underlying reasons which were resolved by temporarily disconnecting other disk. Your other thread shows that you had other issues, for instance your system disk configuration was wrong to start with. Screenshot from your thread, the EFI partition should be partition 1, before anything else, but you had it between two WinRE partitions:

That disk configuration might cause upgrade issues even in the future, regardless that the disk now is disk 0.

Could you please provide at least one link to official Microsoft source stating that Windows should only be installed on Disk 0, that using any other internal disk causes issues? No? I thought so...

Kari

Bree · 22 Jul 2018

Kari said:

What digital license means to you is that you, if you so prefer, can safely totally wipe hard disk / SSD ... clean install the same edition computer came shipped with.... Windows will be automatically activated, subject to computer having access to Internet and Microsoft's digital licensing servers.

Worth adding that you can swap the drive for a replacement one, should the original die. The drive is NOT part of the hardware ID so a clean install of the same edition on the new drive will automatically activate from the digital license.