Learn how to upgrade your Windows edition with Powershell
If you are running on OEM licenses and finally getting a volume license or you need to change the Windows edition of your clients, you can do this with just a few Powershell commands.
All commands have to be executed on the client. Either use the Invoke-Command cmdlet or start a remote Powershell session. In this example we use a remote session:
Enter-PSSession -ComputerName yourclient
First of all, you can check which edition is active on the client:
Get-WindowsEdition -Online
The -online parameters let the cmdlet check for the active installation instead of an image.
The output looks like:
Check the currently installed Windows edition
This client is running a professional edition of Windows.
To change the edition of Windows, you have to provide a new key for Windows. Either use your MAK key or one of the KMS client setup keys (if you want Windows to use your KMS).
These 2 commands will a) Connect to the software licensing service and b)change the key of the installed products to your product key:
$sls = Get-WmiObject -Query 'SELECT * FROM SoftwareLicensingService'
@($sls).foreach({
$_.InstallProductKey('Windows-ProductKey')
$_.RefreshLicenseStatus()
})
Upgrade your Windows edition
If you are using a Key Management Server (KMS), you can use KMS Client setup key to tell your operating system that it should use the KMS to activate. The keys are:
- Windows 10 Enterprise: NPPR9-FWDCX-D2C8J-H872K-2YT43
- Windows 10 Enterprise N: DPH2V-TTNVB-4X9Q3-TJR4H-KHJW4
- Windows 10 Education: NW6C2-QMPVW-D7KKK-3GKT6-VCFB2
- Windows 10 Education N: 2WH4N-8QGBV-H22JP-CT43Q-MDWWJ
For a full list, check this Microsoft page.
To verify if the upgrade worked correctly, use the Get-WindowsEdition cmdlet again.
Your edition has been upgraded
That’s all you need to do.
You can enhance the commands to upgrade many clients in batch processing or combine them to a script checking for the version and run only if required. Let me know in the comments what your script looks like.
Thank you, every one very valuable information.
Thanks for posting this code. Why not also mention the generic KMS Client Key values which can be used in place of ‘Windows-ProductKey’ and can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/previous-versions/windows/it-pro/windows-server-2012-R2-and-2012/jj612867(v=ws.11)
Good idea. I’ve updated the post. Thanks for the comment!
Good stuff, worked a dream.
Had been putting off upgrading the 10 or so until I could work out how to do this remotely.
As usual someone smarter than me had already worked it out!
Also works fine as a remote session.
If you put the command inside a Try Catch the Try portion will attempt to run, and the Catch will be what happens in the event of a failure, you can have it append the PC name to a file to get a list of systems that worked or didn’t work. Something like
@($sls).foreach({
TRY {
$_.InstallProductKey(‘Windows-ProductKey’)
$_.RefreshLicenseStatus()
}
CATCH {
Add-Content “PATH\TO\Log.txt” “$_,Failed”
})
Hi Andy,
Thank you so much for this post. I am working on upgrading all Win10 Pro machines in our company to Enterprise.
The script above:
$sls = Get-WmiObject -Query ‘SELECT * FROM SoftwareLicensingService’
@($sls).foreach({
$_.InstallProductKey(‘Windows-ProductKey’)
$_.RefreshLicenseStatus()
})
Runs when computers are online. It gives error when it can’t connect to a machine. How can I write the error output to a csv so I can see which machines are not successfully upgraded? I am learning Powershell as I go. Thank you for input.