Moved from Win 10 Edu to 10 Pro - but my "organization" still restricts certain features

Hydrarchos

Well-Known Member
Joined
Dec 21, 2017
Hi all,

I have used Windows 10 Education for the past two years after my switch from MacOS, since I work in education. Worked fine, but certain features didn't work because they were apparently "hidden or managed by my organization". These included clipboard history (greyed out) and the option to reverse mouse scrolling direction (not showing at all). It really seemed a case of restrictions for restrictions' sake, to be honest.

Because I now use this laptop for my private company (still work in edu, just not on this machine) I activated a Pro license. Sure, it cost me some money, but I figured I'd get all the good stuff in return and no longer be hampered by Edu's restrictions. However, although I've not activated my license the restrictions still show.

So: can anyone tell me how to get Windows 10 pro working fully?
 
That would be quite enlightening if you'd care to explain what any of it meant.
 
Did the place you work for give you the laptop, and do you still use the same account to access the machine? If yes it's still joined to their domain and group policy is being applied from said organization.

If they gave you the laptop, as in it no longer belongs to the organization it needs to be removed from the domain and the group policies (for the most part) should be removed unless they applied GPPs which can persist even after a system is removed from a domain.
 
Thanks! It's a bit more complicated than that. I bought the edu license off a software store specifically for universities, and installed it myself on my own laptop (i.e., activated the edu license on a regular Windows install). It's possible that the restrictions are coupled to the serial (?).

Also, I was assuming that the issue was related to the license; however, I guess that's not a given.
 
No anytime you see something like this it's going to be group policy. Expand out both Computer Configuration and User Configuration > Administrative Templates > All Settings. Sort both by State and if you have any that are anything other than "Not configured" you have GPOs applied. You can open any that are configured and change them. If you have any manually set GPOs though, those will not go away until you remove the registry values as well as GPPs. For those you can good "manually set <insert topic> via registry" and you should be able to find the key and either remove, rename the key or set it to the correct value.

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Once you've changed them reboot and they should be gone.
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You can launch gpedit.msc
 
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