Windows 10 Pro with Office 2021

About Windows 10 Pro with Office 2021

This is the combined image, and the appeal is entirely about time. A machine goes from a blank drive to a working desktop with the document suite installed in one pass, rather than an operating system install followed by a separate suite install, a separate language selection and a separate round of updates. On a bench with a queue of machines that saves the better part of an hour each.

The desktop half is the Professional edition, so the management pieces are present rather than stripped: full disk encryption, policy management, remote desktop hosting, virtualisation and domain join. The servicing stack is folded into the image already, which keeps the first boot update pass short instead of turning into an afternoon.

The suite half is the perpetual 2021 release with the complete Professional Plus application set, including the database and layout tools that the cheaper bundles drop. It is installed and configured during setup rather than streamed afterwards, so the machine is usable with no network connection at all once the image has been written.

It writes to a USB stick with any standard imaging tool and boots on both UEFI and legacy systems. Setup offers a clean install onto a wiped partition, which is the correct choice whenever the machine can be rebuilt, and the interface language is chosen at the start rather than being fixed by the image.

What is included in this build

• Combined desktop and document suite in one image installed in a single pass
• Professional edition with disk encryption, policy management and domain join
• Remote desktop hosting rather than client only
• Complete Professional Plus suite set including the database and layout tools
• Servicing stack integrated so the first update pass is short
• Multilingual image with ten interface languages selectable at setup
• Boots on both UEFI and legacy BIOS systems
• Fully usable offline once written, with no component streaming during setup

Changed in version 22H2 build 19045

• Latest cumulative servicing update integrated into the image
• Suite component updates rolled into the integrated installation
• Updated storage controller drivers for current NVMe hardware
• Refreshed direct and torrent transfer paths
• Reduced image size after component store cleanup

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Back up everything on the target machine first, since a clean install erases the system partition.
2. Write the image to a USB stick of 16 GB or larger with a standard imaging tool.
3. Boot from the stick, using the firmware boot menu if the machine does not pick it up.
4. Choose the interface language, then select a clean install onto the wiped system partition.
5. Install chipset, graphics and network drivers from the hardware vendor after the first boot.

System requirements and file details

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