Solved Win 11 Pro vs. Pro Workstation OS

At least one member of this Forum runs Win 11 Pro Workstation for their OS. I haven't seen a discussion of the pros and cons. So consider this your invitation.

Some information here about Windows 11 Pro for Workstations that may be of interest to you, Tony.

While we've covered all the differences between Windows 11 Home and Pro, there is one additional SKU that you might see pop up, called Windows 11 Pro for Workstations. This takes the capabilities of Windows 11 Pro even further, and it's made for a much smaller subset of users…. Etc etc

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Thanks. As my computer shop guru would say, possibly more firepower than is needed to surf the Web and send emails.

TonyCzar said:

Thanks. As my computer shop guru would say, possibly more firepower than is needed to surf the Web and send emails.

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I certainly wouldn’t bother. I think there are a few that run it in a VM, I don’t know.
I personally have no interest because… life’s short.

However it might be fun for you, Tony. I know you like to play around with stuff.

group policy was one Major perk back in the day, but now you can actually enable group policy editor in home version via Elevated Command Prompt (Stay connected to Internet to download required components):

command 1

command 2


* @Brink not sure if you have tutorial for that one or not yet

TonyCzar said:

Thanks. As my computer shop guru would say, possibly more firepower than is needed to surf the Web and send emails.

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Unless you have 4 physical cpus or need to support 6TB of RAM, its probably of no benefit to you.

pparks1 said:

Unless you have 4 physical cpus or need to support 6TB of RAM, its probably of no benefit to you.

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That's true -- same with Enterprise versions -- although with Enterprise there's a lot less bloat and services are more optimised. Why a "bog standard desktop" would need 4 physical CPU's in the first place is another issue though.

cheers
jimbo

The only benefit is to use the Ultimate Performance power plan that forces the CPU to work at maximum frequency all the time boosting performance (mine has base frequency 3.5GHz and Turbo Boost frequency 3.9GHz, with Ultimate Performance power plan it runs always at 3.7GHz). This is available in Home and Pro as well but hidden. To unhide it so you can use it open a Command Prompt or PowerShell as Administrator and execute:

powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61

Other than that, Windows 10/11 Pro for Workstations support 4 physical CPUs (not cores) vs 2 in Pro, more RAM and some special hardware only found on workstations, such as non-volatile RAM that preserves its content without power. Remember Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows 7 Ultimate that had some more features over the Professional version? The average user hardly used BitLocker or any other feature not available in the Professional version, but most installed Ultimate to have the "complete" Windows Vista/7 version with no feature missing. The same is true for Windows 10/11 Pro for Workstation except the license is too expensive for the average user to buy compared to Windows Vista/7 Ultimate cost, so he either tries it without activating or activates illegally.