Skip to main content
HashnodeVishal Mathur - IT Consultant and AI Prompt Engineer

Command Palette

Search for a command to run...

How to Select Windows 11 Home or Pro Edition During Installation

Published
•3 min read
How to Select Windows 11 Home or Pro Edition During Installation
V
Vishal Mathur

With over 9 years of experience as in IT, I have led technology operations across diverse industries, ensuring robust IT infrastructure, network security, and team development.

My expertise spans managing IT infrastructure & operations, IT policy, and backup/disaster recovery. My expertise also includes IT asset management, Google Workspace & Office 365, endpoint security, DLP, and cross-platform systems (Windows/Linux/Mac OS) etc.

Additionally, I hold certifications in Google IT Support, CCNA, and IBM Cybersecurity, reinforcing my commitment to continuous learning and delivering robust technology solutions.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best regards, Vishal Mathur

When performing a clean installation of Windows 11, the setup process does not normally present an option to choose the operating system edition. Instead, it automatically installs one of the available editions—Home, Pro, or Education—based on your device or license.

To force Windows Setup to display the edition selection screen, you can modify the bootable media (or ISO) by adding an EI.cfg file. This allows you to select the edition you want, such as Windows 11 Pro, during installation.

Why Doesn’t Windows 11's Setup Display the Select Edition Screen?

Microsoft no longer provides separate ISO files for different Windows editions. Instead, the default multi-edition ISO includes all versions—Home, Pro, Education, and Enterprise.

When you perform a clean installation, Windows Setup automatically detects traces of any previous installation, including the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) license embedded in your computer’s motherboard. It then installs the matching edition without asking you to choose.

While this simplifies activation—since your system is activated automatically—it also removes the option to manually select the Windows 11 edition during setup.

To override this behavior, you can add a Windows Setup configuration file. This optional file forces the installer to display the edition selection screen, and can also be used to automate edition choice and product key validation during installation.

How to Force Windows Setup to Show the Windows 11 Editions During Clean Install

As discussed above, you can place a tiny ei.cfg file inside the bootable media folder to force Windows Setup to show the select edition screen during installation. Here’s how to do it.

  1. First, you need to create a bootable Windows 11 USB drive. If you don’t have an ISO, you can download the Windows 11 ISO image from the Microsoft server.

  2. Next, open a new Notepad file. To do this, press Win + R, type notepad, and click OK.

    ei cfg file notepad

  3. In the Notepad window, copy and paste the following lines:

     [Channel]
 _Default
 [VL]
 0

  4. Press Ctrl + S to open the Save as dialog.

    save ei cfg file

  5. Here, type the file name as ei.cfg. Next, click the drop-down for Save as type and select All Files.

  6. Click the Save button to save the file to your PC.

  7. Next, connect the bootable USB flash drive to your PC.

  8. Press Win + E to open File Explorer.

  9. In the left pane, click on This PC.

  10. Next, double-click on the bootable USB flash drive to view its content.

    sources folder Windows 11 bootable drive usb

  11. Double-click on the Sources folder to open it.

    move ei cfg file sources folder installation media

  12. Now, copy and paste the ei.cfg file into the Sources folder.

Once done, safely eject the USB flash drive. You can now boot using the installation media and select the Windows 11 Pro, Education, or the core Home edition from Windows Setup.

Alternatively, you can also automate the edition selection process by configuring the EI.cfg file to install your preferred edition of the OS. For example, if you want Windows Setup to automatically select the Windows 11 Pro edition during installation, use the following format for the EI.cfg file.

[EditionID]
Professional
[Channel]
_Default
[VL]
0

Save the file as ei.cfg and move it to the Sources folder of your USB installation media. During installation, Windows Setup will automatically select the Windows 11 Pro edition and skip the select edition step.

Select the Pro Edition While Installing Windows 11

While the above method will allow you to install Windows 11 Pro or other editions of the OS, you are still required to have an active license for the selected edition.

If you attempt to install the Pro edition of Windows 11 on a PC that already has a Home edition license tied to it, the system will display a “not activated” message or the error code 0xc004c003 in the Settings panel. On top of that, Microsoft restricts certain customization options on devices running an inactivated copy of Windows.

#windows-11-installation#windows-11-pro-setup#choose-windows-11-edition-during-install#windows-11-pro-not-activated-fix#eicfg-windows-11#windows-11#windows-11-pro

Comments

Join the discussion

No comments yet. Be the first to comment.

More from this blog

What Are Tokens — And Why Should You Care?

The hidden unit of measurement that shapes every conversation you have with Claude. You type a message to Claude. You hit send. A response flows back in seconds. Simple, right? But beneath that seamless exchange, something interesting is happening — your words are being sliced into tiny linguistic units called tokens before Claude ever "reads" them. Tokens are the atomic unit of language for large language models. They're not characters, and they're not always full words. They sit somewhere in between — and understanding them unlocks a clearer picture of how AI language models actually work, why they have limits, and how to work with those limits instead of against them. So what exactly is a token? Think of tokenisation as breaking text into the most useful chunks for a model to learn from. Common words like "the" or "and" are usually one token. Longer or rarer words might get split into two or three pieces. Punctuation, spaces, and newlines all count too. Example — how this sentence gets tokenised Claude under stands language through tok en isation . As a rough rule of thumb: 100 tokens is about 75 words, or a short paragraph. A typical novel runs around 100,000 words — that's roughly 133,000 tokens. Claude's extended context window can hold the equivalent of several books at once. The context window: Claude's working memory Every conversation with Claude happens inside a context window — a fixed-size buffer that holds everything Claude can "see" at once. This includes your entire conversation history, any documents you paste in, system instructions, and Claude's own responses. Once the window fills up, older content scrolls out of view. Claude doesn't forget it in the human sense — it simply can't read past what fits. This is why very long conversations can occasionally feel like Claude loses track of something said much earlier.

May 20, 20263 min read
What Are Tokens — And Why Should You Care?
V

Vishal Mathur - IT Consultant and AI Prompt Engineer

31 posts

With over 9 years of experience as in IT, I have led technology operations across diverse industries, ensuring robust IT infrastructure, network security, and team development.