Clean Install Win 7 HP with Win 10 Home

Good afternoon,

I gave my Sister a Win 7 HP SP1 [ Genuine ] Laptop a few years ago which she now doesn't use, and knowing my Sister, there will be a LOT of junk on there. I am getting it back at some stage over the next couple of weeks and I would ideally like to just Clean Install it with Win 10 Home [ Win 7 HP => Win 10 Home ] using the Win 7 Product Key.

Win 10 Home does NOT have Group Policy Editor which I really need. Is there a way to enable the Group Policy Editor? I did see this which appears to do this . . .

> How to Enable gpedit.msc [ Group Policy ] on Windows 10 Home Devices - GHacks

I do have a NEW unused Win 10 Pro Product Key which I am keeping for a build I intend to make at a later stage in the year, so I do NOT want to use this if possible.

Is this possible, and what is the simplest way to go about this please?

Thanks.

The suggested GPE will not help you, as it adds only the GUI, but without any functionality. By that I mean the changes, you make in GPE are NOT applied to the system. As mentioned on the link you sent

Update: The method described below adds the Group Policy Editor GUI to the operating system but not the functionality.

and confirmed when the question was asked on that link, which you can see if you scroll down to the 9 Jan question and the reply by Brinkmann

Martin Brinkmann said on January 9, 2019 at 9:49 am
REPLY
It is adding the interface but changes are not applied to the system.

As to the clean install the easiest way is to upgrade it and then once you have the windows 10 registered against the hardware hash of the computer on the Microsoft servers, you can then go for a clean install

as indeed suggested by Shawn on his tutorial here
Upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 for Free


Alternatively if you want to do so so you can use the method here for clean install
Clean Install Windows 10 Directly without having to Upgrade First

from gatherosstate.

Personally I have found the upgrade and then clean install far easier and I have not yet had it fail,.

Thanks for the replies, information, and insight @Macboatmaster and @NavyLCDR, it is appreciated.

OK, it seems that the best option then is to perform the Upgrade FIRST and then Clean Install.

I can probably live with that as most of the customisations that I want can be implemented in the ISO prior to me creating the installation media anyway.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the input @zbook,

zbook said:

Download and install:
Products: Belarc Advisor

The advantages of clean install rather than upgrade may include:
a) BIOS / Legacy / MBR > BIOS / UEFI / GPT
b) making sure there are not multiple recovery partitions and that there is one on the far right
c) no need to troubleshoot upgrade failures.

As there is nothing I want to keep, what I am trying to achieve is quite straight forward.

I will Run and Save gatherosstate.exe once I get the Laptop back.
I have already got ALL the OS information [ Product Key ] etc saved in a file.
I will check the BIOS to see if it supports UEFI / GPT, and if it does, I will use that.
On installation, I will delete ALL the partitions leaving a Single Unallocated Partition, which is what I do as a matter of course anyway.

Thanks.

zbook said:

Consider a preventative maintenance step to check the disk drive before the clean install:

(any one or more)
HD Tune
Sea Tools
Crystal Disk
HD Sentinel
etc.

Excellent idea, thanks.
I use HardDiskSentinel for situations like this.