bought Windows 11 s laptop, can I downgrade to Windows 10 home

Bree said:

The digital license may be a restriction. I haven't had my hands on an S Mode machine to test this, but it is entirely plausible that you can't clean install and activate Home until you have switched out of S Mode and upgraded the digital license to Home.

There's no license restriction on 10 vs 11 though. Neither the digital licence or the product key make any distinction, MS now refers to them as being for 'Windows 10/11'.

Attachment 357598

Yeah - we recently discovered you could run a Home on a pc activated with Provdigital licence but not other way round. So I guess it is possible you have to "upgrade" the digital licence by doing the conversion.

My main worry about going direct to W10 clean install before upgrading to W11 Home is if there were oem drivers missing in W10 clean install.

Problem is you have limited access to command or powershell and you may not be able to export drivers. Also, you cannot run win32 programs like Macriym Reflect Free in S mode.

So it is safer to do the upgrade first to W11 Home, and then you can export drivers and also make an image backup with tools like Reflect (actually you can use the crappy Windows backup on S version).

So regardless of licencing aspect, I recimmend converting to W11 Home first, make image backup and export owm drivers, then you can safely install W10 Home knowing you have suitable drivers if missing on W10 (this presupposes W11 oen drivers are W10 compatible - another good reason to create W11 Home first and backing it up).