Microsoft Windows 10 Pro for Workstations Licensing Question

[Julian]

I've done quite a lot of research on this so I'm hoping the following is correct but I would be grateful if anyone could confirm or pick holes in my plan. Disclaimer: This is a cut and paste of a question I posted on the Microsoft community forums an hour or so ago but I haven't used that forum much so don't know how reliable and/or prompt the answers tend to be so am asking additional opinions here.

Also, as people might guess from my previous posts, the buy-Home-retail-edition step might be slightly different, I will first try upgrading one of my Win 7 Home licenses to see if the MS activation servers will still upgrade it to 10 (as they are said to still be doing) and/or maybe SoftwareGeeks will actually deliver me the Win 10 Pro (admittedly OEM) license I bought but for the MS community I kept it simple by talking about a straightforward Win 10 Home purchase (which I might yet do - for simplicity and total security I am very tempted to go into my local PC World and spend £99 to get a boxed Win 10 Home license and be done with it i.e. follow exactly the procedure below).

Finally, people might remember a previous thread about how to get to Win 10 Pro retail. Win 10 Pro for Workstations was actually always my final destination but I had assumed I needed to be licensed for Win 10 Pro before taking that final step. What I think is now the case, i.e. I can actually jump straight from valid Win 10 Home to Win 10 Pro for Workstations license, is new information since starting that other thread hence the slight overlap/duplication/change-of-tack. I am now coming at this from a slightly different angle.

Oh, and yes I have tried to contact Microsoft. Either hold-queue-hell or a chatbot is all I've managed to get.

Anyway, here's my question/plan...

I want to keep using ReFS so need to be running Windows 10 Pro for Workstations (W10PfW) on a new PC I'm building. For flexibility I also want to have retail not OEM licenses so that I can transfer it to any new PC I build since I tend to refresh this PC (as in replace with a totally new self-built PC) every few years.

If I'm reading the Microsoft stuff that I see on the web correctly then I don't actually need to buy a regular Windows 10 Pro license first because Windows 10 Home direct to W10PfW is a valid upgrade path. If I have read that right then this is my plan and I would be grateful for comments on whether it will work...

1) Buy a retail version of Windows 10 Home and install and activate it on my new PC.

2) Go to the online Windows Store and buy W10PfW (UK price £149). It says in the description of that product that "Your use of this new software is subject to the terms of your original Windows Operating System License Agreement" so I assume that, since I would be buying from a PC with a valid retail license activated, that the W10PfW upgrade that I bought would inherit the transferability characteristics of the underlying Home license and not be locked to the current PC.

My understanding now is that, although running the standard Win 10 Pro version was not a licensing prerequisite for buying the W10PfW upgrade, had I been running standard Win 10 Pro then the upgrade would simply have involved a new license key that would enable the W10PfW features already in the standard Win 10 Pro binary so no reinstall necessary. Since I would be taking the slightly cheaper route of upgrading from Win 10 Home however I would now need to jump through a couple of extra hoops...

3) Re-install the PC with Windows 10 Pro (the standard/only version because there is no specific W10PfW ISO download available from the Microsoft site).

4) Activate my new Windows 10 Pro install with an XXXXX- ... -XXXXX format key that I assume would have been delivered to me when I purchased the £149 W10PfW product from the previous Win 10 Home installation on this PC. Or maybe the activation servers would already see the fingerprint on my machine as being entitled to run W10PfW so would automatically enable the new Win 10 Pro installation in W10PfW mode so all features such as ReFS formatting already enabled with no need to reenter the key?

The End? I now have my PC running a fully licensed and activated copy of Windows 10 for Workstations under a retail license so that, if I wanted to replace my PC in a few years time I would be able to transfer the license across to the new PC.

Have I understood all this correctly? I'd like to be sure before I go ahead because even with only buying the Home version the initial purchase of Win 10 Home Retail + W10fWS upgrade is a not insignificant amount of money so I want to be sure that it will buy me what I think it will, i.e. a fully transferable license (retail licensing terms) of Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.

- Julian

[Julian]

I found out the answer to my question. As is so often the case, what I thought was the situation was too good to be true.

In theory one can upgrade straight from Win 10 Home to Win 10 Pro for Workstations (W10PfW) but it is more expensive than going from Win 10 Pro to W10PfW . The Microsoft Store is clever in terms of knowing what version of Windows you have installed on the PC that you are accessing it from so it shows a different price for the in-store purchasable upgrade to get to W10PfW depending on what system you are currently running. I first looked from a W 10 Pro machine and saw a £149 price. I then saw stuff on the web saying that Win 10 Home -> W10PfW was a valid upgrade and thought great. When I did install a fully licensed copy of Win 10 Home however (for which I mercifully had paid no money) and accessed the store I only saw an upgrade product in the Windows Store for an upgrade to regular Win 10 Pro not W10PfW and that was priced at £119.99.

After a bit of head scratching and actually looking properly at what was on the screen I discovered that when accessed from a Win 10 Home Pro machine it is still possible to buy an upgrade directly to W10PfW, it's actually on the £119.99 "Upgrade to Windows 10 Professional" product page. There are a couple of selection buttons in the description with the Win 10 Pro one selected by default but if one presses the W10PfW button in the description then the product changes to the W10PfW upgrade and the price changes to £239!

My options then became either...

1 - Upgrade from my free Win 10 Home Retail (£0) by buying the MS Store Home -> W10PfW upgrade (£239) = £0 + £239 = £239 total cost

or...

2 - Get a Win 10 Pro OEM license from SoftwareGeeks (£20 - actually already purchased by then) and buy the MS Store Pro -> W10PfW upgrade (£149) = £20 + £149 = £169 total cost

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader which one I chose.

I think there might still be the issue of whether it is an apples to apples comparison because I think step 1 would have got me a semi-retail(*) version of W10PfW whereas step 2 has got me an OEM machine-locked license so I would need to repurchase when I build a replacement PC which I hope now won't be for at least another 5 years but knowing me that's by no means a given. Still, ultimately I have a resolution and I now have my new Intel NUC running W10PfW with all the data on mirrored, bit-scrubbing, data-integrity-checking ReFS file systems.

I know some might think I'm nuts for spending so much money on a single feature but with luck that's £30 a year (less if my machine lasts longer) which, given the value of one's personal data, I find acceptable to add yet another layer of protection to me data. No amount of redundant backups, at least using the sort of tools I have found, will protect against bit rot and as my personal dataset grows and grows and has probably been moved between 10 machines on the 30 years or so since I started using PCs(**) I think it becomes more and more of an issue to consider. I am pretty annoyed with Microsoft for removing ReFS from the regular Windows 10 Pro though.

(*) I say "semi-retail" because from what I've read a retail windows license allows you as many transfers between machines as you want whereas, if you use the free upgrade of a Win 7 or Win 8.x retail license to Win 10 your upgraded Win 10 license then is only allowed one transfer to another PC and not unlimited ones. I suppose it's not unreasonable that Microsoft take something away given they have given away the free upgrade.

(**) Well, a heck of a lot longer than 30 years actually. I built my first PC 42 years ago (1976) but it was probably the late 1980s before I actually had any significant amount of meaningful data on any of them.

- Julian