I Finally Got an Arm PC Out of the Insider Program (Premium)

I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I foolishly enrolled a Windows on Arm-based PC in the Windows Insider Program some time ago. This wasn’t an issue for a long time, but when Microsoft changed the Insider Program last year so that the Dev and Beta channels no longer mapped to specific Windows versions, it became impossible to disenroll this PC.

To be clear, there are two issues at play here.

First, because the Dev and Beta channels don’t map to a specific Windows version, there’s never a moment in time in which the stable version of Windows is the same as one of those channels, and so the UI built into Windows for auto disenrolling is never triggered.

Second, because this is an Arm-based PC, even the “nuke from orbit” approach—create USB-based install media and perform a clean install—wasn’t an option because Microsoft has never provided ISOs for Windows 11 on Arm.

Put simply, this PC was stuck in what I call a one-way, dead-end street. And it was all Microsoft’s fault.

But thanks to two recent developments, I felt a glimmer of hope. First, Microsoft announced that it would finally support using Windows 11 on Arm on Apple Silicon-based Macs. And then it announced that it would briefly allow PCs enrolled in the Windows Insider Program’s Beta channel (but not the Dev channel) to disenroll concurrent to the release of the Windows 11 version 22H2 “Moment 2” update. Surely, between these two methods, there would be a way out.

Testing this was difficult, however, thanks to some bad timing. As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, we’re getting ready to move out of our house at the end of March, and as part of the selling process, we decluttered the house and put a bunch of things in storage. Among those things were my M1-based MacBook Pro, which would let me test a fully supported version of Windows 11 on Arm on a Mac, and that Windows 11 on Arm-based PC that I stupidly left enrolled in the Windows Insider Program a long time ago. (And I couldn’t recall whether that PC was enrolled in Dev or Beta).

With our open house behind us—the house is now under agreement—I headed over to the storage unit to fish out the two computers. I wrote about my experiences with Windows 11 on Arm on Parallels Desktop 18 on the Mac the other day. And when I examined the WOA11-based PC, I discovered it was in Dev, not Beta. So it was still stuck.

But when a reader noted that the Parallels install of Windows 11 on Arm on the Mac leaves an install ISO behind, I figured that would do it. And so I copied it over to my PC, created a bootable USB install disk with Rufus, and gave it a shot. I won’t bore you with the details, but after failing to get it to work using the most obvious methods—booting directly from the USB drive, and booting into Advanced startup and selecting the USB drive from there—I finally moved on to attempt number 3 by opening File Explorer, navigating to the install drive, and running Setup from there. I chose a clean install and after an interminable amount of time and a few reboots, I was presented with the normal Out of Box Experience (OOBE) that one sees when bringing up a new Windows 11 PC of any kind. Success.

Interestingly, I wasn’t sure that would happen: I also used the ISO that Parallels downloaded to perform a virtualized clean install of Windows 11 Home on the Mac, and that install had bypassed the OOBE just like the Install Assistant-based routine I wrote about the other day. I looked around for some kind of unattended install file, curious if that was why. But when I did the install on Arm hardware, it worked normally. I’ll take it.

Of course, most people don’t have the unique set of hardware I do, so this information is perhaps interesting but not useful if you’re stuck in your own Insider Program hell on Arm hardware. And your outlook is not great. You could use an unofficial source like UUP dump and hope for the best. Or you can wait for Microsoft to (hopefully) make the official ISOs available via its website.

Good luck either way.