Is it best to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro first and then Windows 11 Pro, or Windows 11 Home and then 11 Pro, or all in one shot? Any advantages/disadvantages? Thanks very much.
Avoid the Windows 10/11 Home to Pro upgrade on the Microsoft Store, as it gets you far less rights than an actual Pro key
Updating from Windows 10 Pro to 11 Pro
Best way to upgrade to Windows 11 Pro?
I did a dumb thing and need help: upgrading windows 11 home -> windows 11 pro
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Purchasing this upgrade does not give you a Windows 10/11 Pro key outright, but instead merely gives you a "digital license" to Pro attached to your Microsoft account. Unfortunately, this severely complicates reinstalls, and worse, at least in my case, Microsoft straight up lost my digital license attached to my account.
I purchased a full-priced Windows 10 Home retail license from the Microsoft Store back in 2016, for which I received a Windows 10 home key that I used across a couple of machines over the years. Last year, I decided to upgrade my license to Windows 10 Pro, and purchased the $100 upgrade off the Microsoft store. The upgrade worked, and I was running Windows 10 Pro successfully.
2 days ago, my Windows suddenly was no longer activated. I tried to reactivate it in Activation settings (using my old Home key, logging into my Microsoft account that I used to purchase the Pro upgrade, and claiming that I changed my hardware). Today, I spent north of 3 hours with Activation Support on the phone, and having them do remote support (where they tried numerous command line tricks), and 3 separate support techs were unable to activate my Windows 10 Pro again (even though they acknowledged that they could see my account had purchased the Pro upgrade). We tried downgrading to Home and using the generic 10 Pro key to upgrade back to Pro with no luck either. I also attempted a clean install of Home and upgrading that to Pro, and deactivating all my machines on my Microsoft account, but with no dice. It seems the Pro upgrade I had purchase was straight up lost.
I eventually gave up and just bought a Windows 11 Pro retail license outright and used that to activate my machine. I suppose that frees up my old Windows 10 Home retail key for another machine, but I just straight up lost the $100 I paid for the Pro upgrade on that.
I suppose the lesson is to either buy a retail Pro license outright (either originally, or if you plan to upgrade from Home), as you will receive an actual product key that transfers across machines. Despite costing more in the end (Home retail + Pro upgrade is $240, while buying retail Pro in the first place is $200), the Pro upgrade gets you far less rights, including the apparent inability to transfer your Pro upgrade to another machine even if you're upgrading a retail Home key, and you run the very real risk of Microsoft losing your upgrade rights as they did with me (even though I didn't change my hardware). Lesson learned I suppose.
Most of the computers in my company are Windows 10 Pro. Since Windows 10 Pro is approaching end of support and update, we like to upgrade these computers to 11 Pro. The computers meets the requirements.
My question is, how can I upgrade these computers without loosing their data, and renaming and joining them back to Domain? What about license? Will the 11 Pro get the license automatically from 10 Pro?
I found this link, do I just run this EXE? Is there a way to deploy the upgrade automatically? We use Tanium for software deployments, so may be that’s an option.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11
In my experience, you should be able to update through Windows update in Settings if you don’t mind going to each computer to schedule/start the upgrade. If you use a Patch Management service, you might be able to upgrade. I know with Action1, a person can schedule upgrade to Windows 11. It should keep all the users’ data and leave them on the domain. Yes, you should be fine on licensing.