Forum Discussion
Upgrade from Win11 Home to Win11 Pro with a unused Win8 Pro Key?
As the subject says. I found two old Win 8 Pro keys that I never got around to use (actually one is on a physical Win8 DVD and the other is a Win 8 Pro key I bought online back when Win8 was launched...
The free upgrade offer is available for Windows 10 devices.
In case you already upgrade the Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 and activated it and revert back to the Windows 8.1 , then you may upgrade to Windows 10 and then if activation worked, then upgrade to the Windows 11.
In theory, in case you upgraded to the Windows 10 and Windows has been activated, you may use the product key in upgrading to the Windows 11, but I haven't tried it , so I couldn't confirm this behavior.
In case you already upgrade the Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 and activated it and revert back to the Windows 8.1 , then you may upgrade to Windows 10 and then if activation worked, then upgrade to the Windows 11.
In theory, in case you upgraded to the Windows 10 and Windows has been activated, you may use the product key in upgrading to the Windows 11, but I haven't tried it , so I couldn't confirm this behavior.
Follow up: I tried to change my Win11 Home product key to the (Key removed) Win11 Pro generic product key, expecting that the result would be a unactivated copy of Win11 Pro on which I could try my Win8 Pro keys or even a Win11 Pro key from the MS Store.
However that didn't work, because the upgrade procedure starts and immediately stops and tells me that I don't have a valid key. Same thing happens entering the Win8 Pro key directly (which I sort of expected though). So it looks like the upgrade path on my Win11 Home is blocked , to the point that I can't even use a generic key for whatever legitimate usage are generic keys supposed to be used for. Maybe it's a OEM thing?