What to Do When You Cannot Onboard a Windows Professional OS Into Microsoft Defender After You Have Upgraded Windows Home Edition to Windows Professional

It’s well known that Microsoft Defender (all versions as of Dec 2024) require a Windows Professional license. Many users buy machines that have Windows Home. When we upgrade Windows Home machines to Windows Pro by buying an upgrade key, there are times when the upgrade misses out on installing some key components that are necessary to run the onboarding script for Microsoft Defender from security.microsoft.com. And the onboarding script gives an error like this: “The service name is invalid.”

Possible solution:

1. Ensure the machine has actually been upgraded to the Professional license. You can check under “About your PC” option.

2. Open command line as administrator and run:
   DISM.EXE /Online /Get-CapabilityInfo /CapabilityName:Microsoft.Windows.Sense.Client

This will show whether “Sense” (which is Microsoft Defender for Endpoint Service’s internal name) is installed or not.

3. If its not installed, run, in the same window:
   DISM.EXE /Online /add-capability /CapabilityName:Microsoft.Windows.Sense.Client

Allow some time for the system to complete the installation.

4. Run the onboarding script.

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