Long story short, I needed to downgrade from Windows 10 Pro to Windows 10 Home and as I discovered, it’s a bit of a tricky situation that requires editing the registry. If you want to downgrade from within Windows using the Media Creation Tool and not have to create a USB key, this is what you will have to do.
In my situation, attempting to run the Media Creation Tool resulted in some error about not being able to upgrade (even though I was trying to do a fresh install). The following steps worked on my machine and should work on yours as well.
Obligatory disclaimer: Follow these steps closely and back up your registry. This is where the settings for Windows live and messing them up can result in unintended issues.
- Open up regedit, go to the start menu and type
regeditand hit enter - Navigate to the path
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion - Change the
CompositionEditionIdtoCore - Change the
EditionIDto core - Change
ProductNametoWindows 10 Home Edition
Now, you have to navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion and make the same changes you made above by repeating the steps to ensure values here are the same.
Now, you can run the Media Creation Tool and you’ll be able to do a new install of your desired Windows 10 version.
