Installing institution-avail Windows Professional over Home Premium

The institution has an arrangement with MS to download one copy of Windows Professional to each student. The school IT folks tell me I have to go into the boot menu (f2) and boot from the DVD containing the school's licensed Windows Professional copy. There is no "product key" that I can find, unless it is somewhere on the DVD embedded in another file. Can someone provide clear, concise and simple instructions to an old pilot to get this thing downloaded?

Lemme try.

A computer can boot from a variety of devices such as the hard disk or a dvd or a usb drive. But what it looks for FIRST to boot from can be defined in the bios. Now, when you press F2 at boot, you'll get into the bios main screen. Here, when you click on the Boot tab, you'll see a list saying 1st boot device, 2nd boot device and so on. The device that you define here as the 1st boot device is what your computer will boot from by default.

So what your institution is saying is that it wants you to boot from dvd. You can do this by moving the optical drive (dvd drive) upwards in that screen till it becomes the first boot device (normally by highlighting it then pressing +).

As for the product key, the institutional pro edition will likely be KMS activated. This means when you first go online, your computer will connect to the institution network and validate with its server.

But there are other aspects here. Installing pro with that disk will likely wipe all your data, so make sure any critical data is backed up before you start. You must also be prepared to reinstall all drivers and apps.

There's not much on there...brand new, out-of-the-box Dell XPS. I'll give that a shot and let you know what comes of it. Thanks.