Activating Win 10S

I installed Win 10S on a pc for use by an elderly relative to minimise click mania impact, and was shocked licence was £220. I had a spare PRO digital licence from an old upgrade I was not using but have long lost original key.

Other users here have said that Win 10S will activate if hardware has a PRO digital licence, although I have never done it.

So as an experiment, I tried to see if I could transfer PRO licence using activation troubleshooter, but it came up with an error message that Win10S does not support the digital licence transfer feature!

So I then tried to install PRO as a dual boot option, on pc and sucessfully transferred digital licence to new PRO. Then I rebooted into Win 10S, and flabber my gast, it was now activated.

So there is a back door way round the Win 10S restriction above which is handy to know.

So then I deleted PRO and boot entry, then tidied up partitions, and I now have an activated version of Win 10S.

I know I could have just probably just installed PRO and given relative a standard account etc, and restricted it to just running uwp apps, but I wanted to be sure it was locked down fully.

BTW - it makes absolutely no sense to buy a Win10S licence when a PRO licence is same cost (at full price), as there is an additional £50 premium to upgrade 10S to PRO!

HippsieGypsie said:

So the digital license of which was a footprint of another PC transferred to the PC you set up, which, of course, has a different footprint. That in turn allowed the 10s to activate since it has that footprint. Therefore, the activation server keeps track with a match of footprint with digital license. It could care less what the OS is as long as it's an equal or lesser "grade" OS. Interesting workaround indeed.

Not exactly - it only works for PRO and 10S as 10S is essentially a limited form of PRO.

First time I clean installed 10 S I got no prompt for a key and it activated automatically. I do believe at that time it was a separate ISO all by itself on MSDN. The assumption was it activated with the Pro DL that that PC already had. I played with it for a bit and found it too restrictive for my tastes. I upgraded to full Pro via change product key and entering the generic pro key. It upgraded and activated OK.

I would think you could clean install Pro, with your legal key, and activate etc. Then clean install 10 S on the same hardware and it should activate. And you would then have the option to upgrade back to Pro with a simple key change.