Laptop has Windows Education installed

I recently bought a fairly basic cheap 11" HP Probook X360 11 as a spare laptop. However when going through set up, when it gets to the page to log in, there is no option to sign in with a Microsoft account, and oobe/bypassnro doesn't work. It requires an educational establishment login. So obviously I can't login and get to the destop.

Just wondering, if I just did a clean install, would it still activate? If it came with Windows Education installed?

It's ok, I'm sending it back anyway. I booted a linux usb live to see if I could find the product key and found it had a celeron processor when it was supposed to have an M3 processor. So not as advertised from the site it was purchased from.

However, if they replace it with the correct one, I may still have the same issue, if they're ex education laptops, so it would be useful to know whether it can be clean installed and activated.

As far as what I've seen the Education and Enterprise hardware is much the same as Home and Pro so I'd assume a clean wipe and install should work BUT activation could be an issue as new machines have the information for a digital license built onto/into the motherboard. Unless just wanting to experiment I'd stay away from those. Our church was given 4 Notebooks that were not properly disconnected from a company's Network/Server and we didn't get the password to even boot them. Fortunately I had the OEM Win7 CD for the same brand, the Notebooks still had the COA sticker and was able to wipe and upgrade to Win10.

You don't have very good luck buying all of these fairly cheap/used spare laptops.

Not recently, no. This was from a particular second hand sales site. Never had issues in the past.

Hazel123 said:

Just wondering, if I just did a clean install, would it still activate? If it came with Windows Education installed?

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I'm thinking that if it would depend on if the key is in the BIOS and if it is, what Windows version is the key is for. Your doing the right thing by sending it back.

The OOBE screens are the same for Enterprise SKUs and Education SKUs. There's no requirement, in a default setup, on Education editions to sign into an .edu account. My guess would be that the device(s) are still tied to the educational institution's Azure/Entra/Intune/cloudy stuff, and that's why it's forcing a logon that way. If you get another one and post a picture, I can tell you for sure.

Yes it looked like it was still tied to an institution's account. Can't remember the exact wording now but it said you had to sign in with your email with three letters at the front and mentioned the name of an institution. So unusable in that state. Out of interest, if I had done a clean install and used the key from the bios, do you think it would have activated?

Probably not. If it's tied to that institution's Intune, they need to release it. Otherwise, Intune knows it's their device, and Windows just keeps trying to re-join their environment.

Pretty shoddy to have sold it like that then without checking before it was sold.

Hazel123 said:

Pretty shoddy to have sold it like that then without checking before it was sold.

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Could be, but honestly, I’ve seen several instances where the Intune admins just didn’t know they need to do that. Should they? Maybe, but I make mistakes too.

Hazel123 said:

Pretty shoddy to have sold it like that then without checking before it was sold.

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My guess is that the school probably had an auction and sold them in large numbers. The buyer may not have even known that they were licensed with a education version of Windows.

Yes that may be the case. It's a company online that has various tech sellers affiliated to them.