Can I still install from scratch Win-10?

[Nomen]

A few years ago I picked up some HP Slim Small Form Factor (SFF) PC's from a retail outlet known for selling off-lease / refurbished PC's.  I don't think they came with a Windows CD but they did come with a hard drive that had been prepp'd for Win-10 startup / registration.  I took the hard drives out and installed M2 SSD drives and downloaded Win-10 2022 H2 iso directly from microsoft, put it on a bootable thumb drive and did a clean install, registered it without having/setting up a microsoft account, did a bunch of stuff to it before connecting it to the net, got them so that they don't perform auto-updates or update checking.  Disabled every link, connection, telemetry to micrsoft that I could or that I knew of.  So in other words I turned them into actual usable Windows-based PC's.

If I were to aquire a new PC today (looking at non-gaming laptops in the $500 - $700 range) would I be able to duplicate this today?  (ie install the same version of Win-10 2022 H2 to a new drive)

In other words, does microsoft still allow the activation of new win-10 installs?

 

[Karla Sleutel]

14 hours ago, Nomen said:

I don't think they came with a Windows CD but they did come with a hard drive that had been prepp'd for Win-10 startup / registration. 

Such OEM drives usually have a hidden "system reset" partition. 

[halohalo]

On 5/31/2025 at 11:28 PM, Nomen said:

In other words, does microsoft still allow the activation of new win-10 installs?

Microsoft still tries to encourage upgrading to Windows 11, so there is no reason to stop the activation for Windows 10 now.

The real problem is you may not be able to find out Windows 10 compatible driver for new PC, because some devices only have Windows 11 driver.

[Tripredacus]

No issue with activations today. I can't speak about what was actually installed onto that refurbished computer. Quite possibly it was the Direct version of the OS. Any new install using System Builder or Retail will still activate but as with any version of Windows, you may have to use slui 4 (telephone activation) if you are re-using a key. I have no experience with the downloaded version of Windows 10 so I can't speak about that.