We have pro keys but honestly it was more work entering them than your quick trick. I am so grateful!!! I am going to be using this trick for years to come. Your trick really saved me a ton of time. I had to install a bunch of software first too.

I have had to go through the steps of creating either a MS account user or local user in setup and then do the migration to Pro inside of windows.

I buy computers mostly from Costco on sale and so they always have Windows Home. Well, not super small anymore, we have 80 employees now. I don't have enough points to comment on amazing answer by Baa. For many, they will have to press shift+f10 and maybe shift+fn+f10 to get the CMD to pop up.

I wanted to add a note to the above answer. However, I then ran slui.exe /upk to uninstall the Product Key, and then tried changepk.exe again, after rebooting the OOBE was now for Windows 11 Pro and I could create a local user and domain join. I ran slui.exe 0x2a 0xC004F069 and it said This errored with 0xC004F069 and said to run SLUI to get full details. I also tried slmgr.vbs /ipk VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T. Running changepk.exe /ProductKey VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T (Key for Windows 11 Pro) brought up the 'Preparing for Upgrade' dialogue but then failed with Error Code 0x80070490.I installed Windows 11 Home into a Virtual Machine and tested this using the Generic Keys from this website, this is what I found to get to the steps above: This is not always necessary but I suspect sometimes the Home license will be installed and needs to be removed first. Technically you can open CMD while it's installing Updates but I don't recommend this because it will restart without warning and might interrupt the following process. Once you hit the login screen, press F10 to open CMD. Choose language, keyboard layout, device name etc.

Windows 11 free upgrade