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Best route - clean install Win 10 Pro on new notebook with OEM Home?
Hi all. New to the site - retired engineer and long time Mac user but not a whiz. Only a few hours exploration of Win 10 so far. Thank you for the opportunity to post a question.
I've a new Asus UX501 VW (UK spec) notebook with 512 GB SSD, 12 GB memory and i7 2.6 GHz with OEM Win 10 home and McAfee Live Safe, and want to clean install WIn 10 Professional instead. No personal data on it to save. There's been lots written on upgrade routes, but perhaps not much on this one.
There's excellent write ups on using Win 10 on line, but I'm struggling to pull together the steps and best sequence by which to handle the above transition. Also to understand the how and why.
1. I'd like to keep a copy of the OEM Win 10 home installation just in case it should prove to be needed. Is saving a system image to an external HDD for safe keeping a good way to do this?
2. Is it also necessary to also make a recovery drive (saved from the OEM set up - to a USB stick?) to facilitate getting back to the OEM set up/to permit installation of the system image/for other reasons? (guessing that the recovery partition on the notebook's SSD will end up being deleted)
3. At what point should the Win 10 home to professional upgrade be bought, and how should the keys/activation be handled? Must the upgrade be bought and downloaded on the computer on which it will be used? One route would presumably be to buy and install an upgrade to WIn 10 pro using the notebook, activate it, and then clean install it?
4. It'd be convenient to end up with the new/Win 10 professional clean install (the operating system) in its own partition, with the rest of the notebook's SSD available for data/personal files. Does Win 10 set up it's own partitions?
5. The newly completed Win 10 prof clean install will presumably require its own recovery USB stick too (is this a good alternative to the usual recovery partition on the SSD?), and presumably a back up image saved to an external drive too. Is the content of these different to that for Win 10 home above?
6. The new Windows 10 professional install will probably also set up it's own partitions on the notebook's SSD - which suggests that the SSD may end up with surplus/unused partitions requiring rationalisation. The question likely then becomes how to tell which of these can safely be removed?
7. I'm presuming that the McAfee security willde facto be removed during the clean install, and that restoring protection will just be a matter of installing the Kaspersky Total Security? (already bought) Is Win Defender good enough to secure/make safe the transaction while buying and paying for the upgrade, and while downloading it?
Pardon all the questions - but even a setting down the best sequence of steps would help greatly...