Recently, the Indian government issued a caution about the upcoming end of support for Windows 10 which is about four months away. Interestingly, on that very day, Microsoft made a major announcement regarding this as the tech giant debuted free enrollment options wherein support would be extended for another year at no extra cost.
Microsoft is also trying to make it easy to set up Extended Security Updates (ESU) with a new tool. You can see in the image below:
Following that, today, the company has shared a new guide on how to activate ESU via Intune in the case of Windows 10 office PCs that are not supported on Windows 11. First up, Microsoft has reminded users of the prerequisites of Windows 10 ESU:
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The system needs to be on Windows 10 22H2 with KB5046613 (November 2024 Patch Tuesday) or newer.
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The device needs access to the network endpoints required for client activation.
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The process that is used for activation needs administrative privileges on the device.
The guide contains several PowerShell scripts and are meant for IT admins and system admins. One of those is a validation script "Check-Win10ESUPrereq.ps1" that Microsoft has published to help "verify a device has the required version and patch level for Windows and it can communicate to the required network endpoints." Essentially, it checks if the aforementioned requirements are satisfied and can be used for troubleshooting against those prerequisites.
After the "validation," Microsoft says there are two ways to proceed with the ESU key activation. First. it can be done by either Remediation through: Detection Script (Win10ESUActivation-detect.ps1) and Remediation Script (Win10ESUActivation-remediate.ps1).
And second, by Win32 Application with Win32 Install Script (Win10ESU-install.ps1) and Win32 Detection Script (Win10ESU-detection.ps1).
In the case of Remediations, Microsoft mentions "some licensing considerations" due to which "some smaller companies may not have that option."
Finally, Microsoft has also shared some Activation IDs for manual verification via Slmgr VB script for obtaining volume activation information:
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Win10 ESU Year1: f520e45e-7413-4a34-a497-d2765967d094
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Win10 ESU Year2: 1043add5-23b1-4afb-9a0f-64343c8f3f8d
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Win10 ESU Year3: 83d49986-add3-41d7-ba33-87c7bfb5c0fb
You can check the full guide and the details here on Microsoft"s official Tech Community website.