Upgrade W10 Home to PRO ?

I'm needing a workable procdure for this upgrade. Since its been a long time since I purchased a NEW manufactured system (usually build all my own desktops), I know little in what form the machine will be in at power up. Some history first:

I have just purchased a Lenovo laptop to replace my aging HP Envy laptop (should be here this weekend). The Lenovo comes with W10 home, a 512gb NMVE drive and of course it will have it prerequisite Recovery partition of which I will get rid of once I get it up and running in W10 pro.

The question I have is would it be best to perform a upgrade in place or perform a Clean install of W10 pro (I have a new W10 pro Retail key) ? The only benefit that I can see is I will not have to search and download all of the custom Levono drivers. But I will still have to clean all of the crap software they normally include ?

If I opt to perform a clean install, would it be better to extract the drivers before clean install, or try to download them from the Lenovo support site and install them after W10 Pro is installed ? I've noticed with out a serial number (Since all of these manufactures today build 1000 different configurations), using just model numbers does not work any more).

Hope somebody that has done this recently can help me out.

Thanks

storageman said:

The Lenovo comes with W10 home, a 512gb NMVE drive and of course it will have it prerequisite Recovery partition...

Machines supplied with Windows 10 pre-installed by the OEM do not normally have a multi-GB recovery partition with a factory image in it. That was last seen with Windows 8. A Windows 10 Reset uses its own system files as the source from which to do the install, with a relatively small OEM provisioning package (stored on the C: drive) that contains the OEM drivers, customizations and OEM apps.

The question I have is would it be best to perform a upgrade in place or perform a Clean install of W10 pro (I have a new W10 pro Retail key) ? The only benefit that I can see is I will not have to search and download all of the custom Levono drivers. But I will still have to clean all of the crap software they normally include ?

This machine will have a W10 Home key embedded in its firmware. In a clean install Setup will find this and skip asking you for a key, or which edition to install. It will install Home. There are a couple of ways to force an install of Pro by adding an ei.cfg or PID.txt file to the install media. Either that, or let it install Home then upgrade it to Pro with your key. The end result will be the same, whichever way you do it.

I did both on a laptop that had a W8.1 Home key in its bios. I had already clean installed W10 Home and configured it to my needs before I decided to buy Pro. I made a Macrium image of the machine, clean installed Pro to get it a digital license, then restored my Home image and upgraded that to Pro with the generic Pro key.

My vote is always to do a clean install.
- Run DISM to backup all drivers. (Dism /online /export-driver /destination:X:\Lenovo_drivers) Backup and Restore Device Drivers in Windows 10
- Do a clean install
- Open Device manager. Make it look for missing drivers on X:\Lenovo_drivers

A clean install to upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Pro? Giant overkill, I think. AFAIK, it´s only necessary to enter the Pro key.

I recently bought a new Lenovo laptop (AMD). The pre-installed software was minimum, only Office 365 trial.

The Recovery partition is the small Windows WinRE partition, which should be left alone.

Thanks for everybody that has posted.


1 power the new system up, extract drivers
2 Make a backup of the current system.
3 modify my downloaded W10 install USB and add a PID File as documented
4 perform a clean install - If the PID option didn't work, I'll follow the steps in Brink's tutorial.
5 I should end up with a clean 10 pro install and then update the drivers.
6 Make a backup of the new system.

I should be good to go. Now if only if the machine gets here I can start.

Thanks again.

storageman said:

I should be good to go...

One final tip before you start.

When you start up Home for the first time you got through the OoBE setup where you create the initial user account. The option to create an offline local account is missing in Home, you are forced to use a Microsoft account. Pro still allows you to set up a local account, but not Home. There are a couple of workarounds to get the offline option to show in Home.

The first in NOT to connect to the internet during the initial setup.

The second is when asked for an 'Email, phone or Skype' to type a non-existent number such as 1234567890 and click Next. The following screen asking you to confirm the number has an offline option. See Step 24 in the Clean Install tutorial.

storageman said:

The question I have is would it be best to perform a upgrade in place or perform a Clean install of W10 pro (I have a new W10 pro Retail key) ? The only benefit that I can see is I will not have to search and download all of the custom Levono drivers. But I will still have to clean all of the crap software they normally include ?

If you want to get rid of the crapware, then I would suggest do the in place upgrade to Windows 10 Pro by simply changing the product key to your Windows 10 Pro product key. Then do a "fresh start:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...-a-fresh-start