Transcription
Today, I'm going to show you how to upgrade your existing Windows 10 Home or Pro to LTSC without losing your programs or data. This will allow you to continue to get security updates until 2027 or 2031, depending on which edition you go with. Stay tuned.
So, with Windows 10 quickly losing support in just a few months, it's time to start thinking about how you're going to continue to receive security updates. Now, we've talked about upgrading unsupported hardware to Windows 11. And we've even talked about Microsoft's extended security update program for Windows 10. Now, we're going to be talking about LTSC, which stands for long-term servicing channel, but we're going to do it in a way where it doesn't require a fresh install, but instead, we're going to update Windows Home or Pro to LTSC without losing anything.
But first, I got to pay some bills. So, check out today's sponsor. And you know what? On a side note, you're going to need a license for LTSC for this guide. So, luckily, my sponsor there provides one.
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Now, on with the video. So, I want to cover this right off the bat so there's absolutely no confusion with the YouTube overlords. This guide does not show you how to pirate the Windows operating system. This guide requires a valid license for Windows LTSC 2021. I will not be showing you how to bypass that license requirement. And just in case someone didn't understand, let me repeat that. You will have to provide Windows with a valid license for Windows LTSC 2021. Whether you get that license through my sponsor VIP SCVD Key or you acquire your own, this video does not show you how to pirate the Windows operating system. This guide is completely above board and everything I'm showing you how to do is within compliance with the Windows license, even though this process is not supported by Microsoft. So, you're definitely not going to find documentation about how we're doing this on Microsoft's website.
Now, with that out of the way, let's talk about why you would want to do this in the first place. Windows 10 loses support on October 15th, 2025. At the filming of this video, that's about 3 months away. Once Windows 10 reaches end of life, you will no longer receive security updates for vulnerabilities that are uncovered for Windows 10 moving forward. And here's the thing, one of the most important aspects of computer security is using up-to-date software. Now, I know there's going to be lots of people in the comments claiming that Windows updates are not important, but to just be blunt and not waste too much of your time here on this topic, they're just wrong. Not only are they important, but they are the most important aspect of computer security.
So, if you want to continue to use Windows 10, there are very few options. However, there are options. You can sign up for the ESU program. This is available from Microsoft for $30 and extends updates for up to one year. You can also get this for free by jumping through a few hoops. But either way, this only gets you updates until October of 2026. The other option is to use Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021, which stands for long-term servicing channel. LTSC will still receive security updates until 2027. That's a year longer than the ESU program. However, if you upgrade to IoT LTSC, you'll continue to receive security updates until 2031. That will give you six more years of Windows 10.
Now, the difference between the standard LTSC and the IoT LTSC is that the standard LTSC is meant for general purpose devices. This would be for any kind of workstation or desktop computer that you want to use. While the IoT LTSC is intended for dedicated or specialized devices, kind of like kiosks or ATM machines.
Now, before we get started, I highly recommend doing a complete backup of your system. At minimum, back up your important documents. And if you're really paranoid, it might be a good idea to take a complete image of your primary hard drive because following this guide, we're not only going to be upgrading from Windows 10 Pro, but we're also going to be downgrading from 22H2 to 21H2 because Windows 10 LTSC 2021 is based on 21H2. This is a very, very, very not supported process by Microsoft and all sorts of things could go wrong. Just keep that in mind and don't blame me if it goes bad. Now, with that said, let's get into it.
Okay, so here we are in Windows 10. If I click on the start button right here, we're going to go into settings. And then from settings, we're going to scroll down to system. And we're going to go all the way down to the bottom where it says about. And as you can see, we are currently on Windows 10 Pro. And this is version 22H2. So if you keep your Windows 10 up to date, this should be the same version that you're on right now. In fact, this one is updated up to the filming of this video right here.
Now, what we need to do is first we need to find out exactly what version of Windows 10 Pro we have. And we're looking for the language version. And to do that, we're going to go ahead and click on start, type cmd, and open up control panel. And we're going to have to say yes to the user account control. And then once we do, we're going to go ahead and type in disism space forward slashon online, if I can spell it right, space. And then we want to go forward slashget dashl. And by doing that, it's going to tell you what language version that you're currently using. So, as you can see, the system local right here is English US. So, what you're going to want is you're going to want the LTSC ISO for English US. It has to be exactly the same UI language. So, English US is what we're looking for. If yours happens to be English global or something like that, then you're going to need a slightly different ISO than I'm going to be using for this video. So, just make sure that you find the English US version of whatever ISO that you're looking for.
And that brings up another complication in this problem because you can't just download the full ISO for LTSC from Microsoft's website. So what I've done is I've picked up mine from archive.org because at one point in time Microsoft did offer these ISOs, but unfortunately they put it behind a wall to where you can't download them now. So what I would do is grab whichever version that you need. In this case, it's going to be the English US version of Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC and then download it from archive.org. Now, if you go on archive, there is actually a bunch of different versions of LTSC. So, and then you can kind of dig through and find your version here, but make sure that you get the same language version that you currently have installed on your system if you want to upgrade your Windows 10 to LTSC.
And then, while we're at that, you're going to need a license. So, if you want to go to my sponsor, my sponsor does have licenses for LTSC 2021. So, the link for that will be down in the description below.
So, now that we've gotten that all out of the way, the next thing that we need to do is actually upgrade this thing. Now, normally LTSC will only allow you to do a clean install from Windows 10 Pro. So, what we have to do is we have to trick the installer into thinking that LTSC is already installed and that we're just doing an in place upgrade on it. And to do that, we're going to click on start. We're going to go regggedit. Going to go ahead and yes to the user account control. And then you're going to want to go to I'm currently here already now, but you want to go to the local machine software Microsoft Windows NT and then current version just like this. If you were to go to local machine software Microsoft scroll down from Microsoft down to Windows NT from Windows NT go current version and then that's where you should be where most of our changes are going to take place. And those changes are going to be starting with the addition ID right here. As you can see mine's professional. So we're going to go ahead and change that to enterprise S. And then go ahead and hit okay. And then the next one is going to be product name. And that's going to be right down here. And as you can see for mine, it's Windows 10 Pro. So we're going to go ahead and double click on product name. And we're going to change that to Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC. And then go ahead and hit enter.
Now, we need to change the actual release ID and the display version. And that's going to be right here. So the release ID is 22H2. Well, we need to change that to 21H2 because we have to fool Windows into thinking that we're running 21H2. And you also want to change it up here in display version as well. So, we're going to go ahead and change that to 21H2 as well. And then hit okay. And then from there, we also need to change the current build number as well as the build itself. So, the current build right here and the current build number. And they're both the same number and they're 19045. We want to change this to 1904. and then go ahead and hit okay. And the same thing with the current build number. We want to change this to 19044.
Now, once you've made these changes, we're essentially ready to go. So, at this point, all you need to do is go ahead and close the registry editor. And then immediately afterwards, you don't want to restart your computer. You don't want to do anything else. You want to mount the ISO and install Windows. And what this is going to do is it's going to pull that information that we just got out of the registry and it's going to make it think that it's just doing an in place upgrade on LTSC. So I'm going to go ahead and tell it not to do updates. Not because you have to do that, but just because I want it to go a little bit quicker. And it's going to go ahead and check the PC. And it finish that. And then it's saying making sure you're ready to install.
Now at this point it's going to take a while to get through this step. kind of be patient though because this does take quite a while to finish. But you just sit back and it'll eventually finish up. Now, like I said, it's going to take a while to get through this section right here. I don't know why it takes so long, but you just have to wait it out. It may have something to do with the fact that the installer is confused because of what it sees isn't LTSC, and it expects to see LTSC. But if you just let it do its thing, eventually it'll continue on with the installation. So, unlike you guys, I'm going to use the power of video editing to skip to the next step. And I'll meet you there.
And here we go. That actually did take quite a while to get through, but like I said, if you just wait it out, it will eventually get through it. And right here it'll it's telling us it's going to install Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC and it's going to keep our personal files and apps. And then we can go just hit the install button and it'll start installing. So it's going to take it a while to get all the way to the end because this is a regular in place upgrade. At this point it just acts like an in place upgrade. So I'm going to go ahead and skip ahead to the end to where we can see that we do have LTSC. And I do have some closing remarks. So don't click off this video quite yet. But with that said, let's get to the end.
Okay, so here we are back in Windows 10 and everything looks the same. If you click on the start button, we're going to go into settings here. And as you can see, we're no longer activated, but that makes sense. We're going to click on system, go to about, and as you can see, we are now running Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, and the version is 21H2. And if we go through here, you can see that I still have all of my documents that I had before, as well as all the applications that I had before, like Chrome is still installed. Even my shortcuts that I had here before for this video are all here installed. And if you also go through, you can see that everything that I had, even Steam is still installed on here, as well as some other programs that don't actually come with LTSC, like Co-Pilot, for example, which it still works. So apparently, you can have Copilot in LTSC, especially if you upgrade from a regular version of Windows 10.
At this point, you still need to activate Windows. And to do that, you need a license for LTSC. Like I said in the beginning and I showed you earlier, this method requires a valid license for Windows 10 LTSC 2021. There are many different ways to acquire this license, but I'll leave that one up to you. I do know, like I've mentioned several times, that my sponsor today, VIP CD Key, does sell licenses for LTSC 2021. and I'll have a link to that down in the description below. Make sure that you use the code cyber CPU for 25% off.
These are there are some downsides to doing this though. For one, LTSC is based on Windows 10 21H2, not 22H2, like the latest version of Home and Pro. Because of this, many software publishers have already stopped supporting it. Like for instance, you can't install the latest versions of Photoshop on Windows 10 21H2. So you'll be out of luck using Photoshop and LTSC. This problem unfortunately is going to become worse the further out of support Windows 10 Home and Pro become. So it might become such a burden that you won't even last until 2031. That's why I went with the 2027 one myself. It just depends on what software you use and if the publisher continues to support Windows 10 with that software.
That's another reason why it's probably a good idea to just start looking into upgrading to Windows 11. Windows 11 is a free update to Windows 10. And it's relatively easy to upgrade your existing Windows 10 system to Windows 11, even if you're on unsupported hardware. Now, with that said, I don't know if there's a process to upgrade from Windows 10 LTSC to Windows 11. So, following this guide may be a dead end for your operating system. If you later decide that you want to go to Windows 11, you may have to do a fresh install. However, that's a topic I may do a little bit of research on because before doing this video, I didn't even know it was possible to update from Windows 10 to LTSC. Maybe going backwards is also possible, facilitating an upgrade to Windows 11, but that'll have to be for another video.
Also, there is a Windows 11 version of LTSC as well. And if you want to know more about that one, then check out this video here where I install Windows 11 LTSC. Back when I made that video there, I didn't know that my sponsor sold licenses for it. So, keep that in mind if you want to use it. But as always, you guys have a great day.