hoe to downgrade from windows 10 pro to windows 10 home

My laptop didn’t yet have Win10 Pro on it. Britec09 was downgrading an existing Win10 Pro installation. Make sure you have a Windows 10 Home license key, so that you’ll be able to activate your system after you go to all this trouble. Back up program settings (e.g., open browser tabs, app configurations) and user data (e.g., personal files) that you don’t want to lose, in case something goes wrong (or, in my case, if you’re replacing an existing installation with another installation). The necessary steps, as I interpreted them, with links to various sources (mostly my own prior posts, in which I worked through related issues), were as follows: Its process seemed almost identical to that recommended by Reviews of Jay. I decided to start by working through the steps recommended in that video.

Possibly the most highly rated recent guide was that provided in a YouTube video (141,649 views, 2.3K upvotes, 73 downvotes) by Britec09 (422K followers). My search for guidance led to assorted sites of variable reliability.

If that worked, it seemed I should be able to activate it using the laptop’s Win10 Home license. So that raised the question of whether I could clone Win10 Pro from the desktop to the laptop, as just described, and then downgrade it to Win10 Home on the laptop, without losing the programs I had installed and the settings I had configured on the desktop. Instead, I was content to let the laptop be a Win10 Home machine. I wasn’t keen to make that investment in this laptop. To register the laptop as a Win10 Pro machine, so that the Pro clone could be activated, I would need to use or buy an upgrade key. The desktop used Win10 Professional, whereas the laptop’s activated installation was Win10 Home. I had mostly had good experiences with AOMEI Backupper, so I tended to use that.īut even if the desktop system worked after cloning onto the laptop, I wouldn’t be able to activate it. I could have cloned the desktop system over to the laptop, using one of the system clone tools on my Kyhi USB drive. At least two of them had the “universal restore” or “dissimilar hardware” feature that would enable them to restore a working image of a Windows installation from one computer onto a different computer, so that the cloned system would work without significant driver issues. The laptop came with a basic Windows 10 installation. A later post significantly improves upon and upgrades this one. A slight adjustment, and the process worked. It turned out that my Win10 Pro installation was too new.

To achieve that, I used steps recommended by multiple sources. I wanted to copy it over from the desktop to the laptop, and then activate it using the product key for the laptop’s Win10 Home installation. I didn’t want to have to go through all that again to have a similar system on my laptop.

I had a fully configured Windows 10 Professional installation on my desktop computer.

Hoe to downgrade from windows 10 pro to windows 10 home