Windows 10 LTSC conversion and modification guide

win10_GAC_to_LTSC.md

LTSC conversion and modification guide

If you're still on Windows 10, then very clearly you have no interest in "Upgrading" to Windows 11, and Linux isn't something you want to use yet.

Following this comprehensive guide, you too can take a copy of Windows 10, upgrade the edition to Enterprise, and give yourself a fresh start with software. This should buy you enough time to get good with an open-source alternative, or wait until Microsoft learns their lesson and… yeah right. Just use a Linux already for pete sake but if you cannot do that, then this guidance should help you get along with your computer much better, after it quits trying to promote absolute garbage to you.

Prior considerations and disclaimers

You don't necessarily need to back up your files in %userprofile% but you might want to. While ideally, everything from a former Windows installation should end up in a separate location at %systemdrive% there is still a possibility of data loss from corruption while following these instructions, so any such is entirely on you. If you are confident that your files will be kept when installing Windows 10 LTSC on top of your current 10 GAC installation, then you may proceed.

You will need to know your local account name and password. If you do not know this because you logged into a Microsoft account, it may be a good idea to first dis-associate your Microsoft account with your current Windows user profile — you could re-associate it later. You also definitely want to make sure that everything you have in OneDrive exists on your local machine, or you confirm to yourself that it is possible to obtain these files later. During this process, OneDrive will be rendered unavailable unless you install it.

Windows' secret administrator

If you aren't sure about your username and password, you can always enable the administrator account, by doing the following:

net user administrator /active:yes

This will enable the administrator account, which you can sign into as a last-resort until you figure out your username and password. You can replace yes with no to disable it later.

Lastly, just use open-source applications and non-Microsoft equivilents to proprietary software already. You don't need to worry about losing any web services (and money from monthly subscriptions) if you aren't using them, and the selection of software available from PortableApps is nice to have.

Install their software suite for your local user (so it's put into %userprofile% ) as-well anything else you want to keep between Windows instances, and you should still have those applications when the upgrade is finished. Same with games; if using Steam, move everything to a custom location as you had when installing PortableApps, and everything should remain where it was before the upgrade process.

Considerations for web service users

If you encounter insufficient space to back up the old Windows instance during installation, then some sacrifices might need to be made. Especially with a service like Steam. But if you are aware of where save data is for each title, you can delete everything except that in your more space-consuming of titles, and validate installations afterward.

So long you can regain access to files via web services for obtaining them yet again, it's fine to remove current copies of them if it means trimming down your current Windows installation. Your old software files which still exist on-media afterward will not become deleted, but instead moved into the old Windows installation directory; we can take advantage of this by re-installing affected software, then replacing default preferences / configuration with such from the old Windows instance.

Lies and deception

For the method we are using, we will borrow some advice from Massgrave about the methodology. First, obtain Windows 10 LTSC through a link from their domain for Microsoft Activation Scripts. Afterward, you can make one modification in your registry to make the setup utility from its disc image (once Windows Explorer mounts it to a virtual medium) so it asks you nothing about a product key:

• Open cmd as administrator and perform the following

  reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion" /v EditionID /d EnterpriseS /f

• Alternatively, open regedit.exe; navigate to HKEYLOCALMACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion and change key EditionID to value EnterpriseS

Yes, either way, this is case-sensitive. Also, if you encounter any problems during pre-installation which prohibit you from continuing for any reason, part of setup's cleanup is to revert the EditionID — every time you edit this key before finalising initialisation, its original value will be restored. Same happens when rebooting.

After pre-installation setup is finished, you should see that the utility will elect to keep apps and personal files. You could go along with this, but having close to a fresh start as-possible without losing your personal effects is the play here to completely omit software like CoPilot and OneDrive. Unless you actively rely on these services (which do mind they can be re-installed later), you should edit these preferences so only personal files in %userprofile% are kept.

Once the omission of prior applications is configured, installation should proceed with little trouble. But this may take several hours of your time, so you may want to schedule this around a visitation elsewhere outside your house, without too much else time-sensitive requiring your machine. When you return; all should be finished, or close enough to not take too much longer before completion.

Remember; following this advice means you basically have a fresh start with Windows, even though all of your existing files are in %systemdrive%\Windows.old.

A series of operations

As-if your patience hasn't been tested enough while re-installing Windows, what comes after is likely going to bother you mentally more than all-else here, But if you care about privacy and don't want to even open Edge, then starting from the Internet being disabled, perform the following:

1. Open gpedit.msc
   • Navigate to Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Data Collection and Preview Builds and find the item labelled "Allow Telemetry".
   • In the dialogue for "Allow Telemetry", of the four options provided, specify the top-most one (0 - Security (Enterprise Only))

   Fun fact: this same option exists in Windows 11! Here's what had changed:

   • Rename from "Allow Telemetry" to "Allow Diagnostic Data"
   • Removal of "Enhanced" option; it's now on, limited or off.
   • 0 - Security (Enterprise Only) has become Off (Not Recommended).Hmmmm…

2. Connect to the Internet
3. (Optionally) If your machine wasn't acting the best before, you may want to open services.msc and stop Windows Update
4. To restore functionality of Microsoft Store, in powershell send wsreset -i
5. To restore functionality of winget (should you care to use it), use Microsoft Store to obtain UniGetUI; don't consent it unless you want a GUI for third-party software management, this is only being performed to easily obtain winget as a software dependency.
6. (If you've stopped Windows Update service prior, start it now.) Update Windows completely; seems counter-intuitive but problems with future steps may occur if the system isn't entirely up-to-date



Some people might not be keen on Windows always coaxing them into opening Edge, and if you're the sort of person who don't want to feed more data into Microsoft's training set which better-enables capabilities Microsoft wishes to provide for their various CoPilot agents, then you may be interested in performing the folllowing:

7. After updates are complete, If you wish not to use Microsoft Edge, now would be a good time to visit Apps and Features to remove Microsoft Edge and WebView2.

   This may break software requiring WebView2, but removing the browser itself doesn't get rid of everything related to Edge.

8. Either use Microsoft Store, or winget in powershell to install a alternative browser of preference.

You can also re-install your preferred software obtained from Store or elsewhere (so long it's in Microsoft's catalogue), then use your old Windows installation's contents in %systemdrive%\Windows.old to restore preferences and configurations.

9. Since this software cannot easily be found using the Microsoft Store, a resolution for issues with ms-gamingoverlay can be resolved by using powershell to send winget install 9nzkpstsnw4p, which will install and enable Xbox Game Bar.

Restoring the past

If electing to keep personal files only, that basically means only your personal files will be immediately available, but everything from your former installation still exists in the media Windows is on — it's all at %systemdrive%\Windows.old.

Application data also exists, but if you have no former experience navigating through it, you may be unaware that while Windows didn't "Restore" your applications or preferences, you can basically do this yourself. Let's use Ablaze's Floorp (a derivative of Mozilla's Firefox with more customisation features) as an example, since it also introduced an odd problem for me in particular; the refusal to automate dependency installation. More ordered operations assuming you already had this software before:

1. Open powershell
2. Perform winget install ablaze.floorp
   • Since this might fail to install Visual Studio C++ redistributable, also do this per its output:

     winget install microsoft.vcredist.2015+.x64

3. In explorer navigate to %systemdrive%\Windows.old\Users\%username%\appdata\local
4. Select Floorp and copy it.
5. Either remove from address bar \Windows.old or navigate to %localappdata% and paste to establish Floorp's previous user configuration and preferences.
   • If the browser was opened before doing this, it may prove well to delete present contents before restoring former contents.
6. Open the browser, and continue as you were.

This is only one of many various examples where you can restore functionality and preferences from existing applications once re-installed. Make good use of your brain and figure what applies to your personal situation best you can. I've got faith you'll figure it out.

If you're not sure what you had before, these two commands should help:

get-childitem -path $env:systemdrive\Windows.old\Users\$env:username\appdata\Roaming -recurse $appname
get-childitem -path $env:systemdrive\Windows.old\Users\$env:username\appdata\Local -recurse $appname

The difference between your variables and Microsoft's default environmental variables is that theirs begin with env:.

These commands will yield nothing, because appname is undefined. It's a placeholder, but you can make the placeholder do something, which may be desired over constantly using the cursor keys and replacing values there. So based on the prior example above:

new-variable -name appname -value "Floorp"

Then, you only need to press up a few times to return at the variable assignment, re-assign the variable, and re-run the command. Even if it seems like doing either will yield the same effort, for future understanding of how variables can save keystrokes, it's basically good practice.

Activation

Since you don't have a key for IoT Enterprise Windows, you'll want to use Microsoft Activation Scripts by Massgrave for this. Follow their instructions, and use their HWID method to activate this new instance of Windows, which should basically work for any machine, and enable lifetime updates for 10 Enterprise LTSC… until Microsoft finds some way to break this after so-long of people following this advice.

Best of luck. Have fun!