Woops I installed Windows 8 instead of Windows 8 Pro!

After installing Windows 8 I tried to do a couple of things that I normally do to set up my computer.

I went to enable “Remote Desktop”… but there was no options. Hmm…

I wanted to make a change to the “Local Security Settings…”. Hmmm…

Both of these things were missing and I started to google bing for information on how to change a setting. And, lo and behold I found:

If you are troubleshooting why secpol.msc does not seem to exist in your copy of Windows 7, then the reason is probably that you have the Home Premium version; unfortunately you need to upgrade, or else try another machine that does have the Ultimate Edition.
- Secpol: Local Security Policy Editor 

But I have Windows 8 Pro? But no… alas I dropped the ball and installed “Windows 8”. Full stop… and not “Windows 8 Pro”…

How do you tell? Simples…

Figure: View the Properties of “Computer”

Which will open the system information about your computer. This will tell you lots of things of use on bare metal, but as this is a Hyper-V box there is little of import. Except the edition of Windows…

Figure: Aww nuts… Windows 8 (only)

I did think that I needed to reinstall, but I thought that should at least give the “Add features” a try…

Figure: Get more features the easy way

You will get asked for a key for the new and higher edition of Windows 8 that you want to move to.

Figure: But I already have a nice MSDN key at the ready?

You will likely just have selected the wrong key from your MSDN and you can select “I already have a product key” and enter the new one.

Figure: Phew… Windows 8 Pro

Lets just check that we can indeed access the goods…

Figure: Why is this a Pro only feature?

I was quite happy not to have to reinstall, but you can choose what you want to do. My suggestion is to use a Pro key the first time round!

Did you install the wrong version of Windows?

How easy was it for you to fix it?