Make sure you’re willing to part with any files on the flash drive before you run the Media Creation Tool, as this will wipe any files on the drive so that it can be used as a dedicated drive purely for the Windows 10 boot installation. If you don’t already have one handy these can be picked up quite cheaply these days. This needs to have enough storage capacity to fit the Windows installation files on it – current recommendations (from the installer tool) are to use a drive at least 8GB in size.

You’ll need an empty USB flash drive to put the Windows 10 boot installation onto. (Note: we’ll actually still use a 3rd party program to create the bootable USB flash drive, as we’ve had numerous reports of the Windows Media Creation Tool throwing up errors when trying to create the actual USB drive) 2. In previous versions of Windows, this process was something that had to be done with a 3rd party program. The tool has a simple wizard interface and will download the Windows installation files and can copy them onto a USB Flash device of your choice. You can get this tool from here, but it’s worth making sure you have all the necessary items ready first. This Windows 10 Installation Media Tool has been created by Microsoft to streamline the bootable USB flash drive creation process, which will allow you to install Windows 10 to any computer via a USB stick. The “Windows 10 Media Creation Tool” from Microsoft (free) Since many new PCs don’t include an optical drive (DVD/Blu-ray) we’ll focus on the USB flash drive method here. You can also force a computer with an operating systems installed to boot from the USB flash drive by changing your boot order settings through BIOS or UEFI (not covered in this guide). “Bootable” simply means that a computer with no operating system installed can use the USB flash drive as it’s boot disk (the first program that runs when ‘boot’ your computer – which is just another way of saying ‘turn it on’) to load the installation files. The usual method is to do install Windows is from a bootable DVD or USB flash drive. You’ll need to install Windows (or another operating system) before you can start using your newly built PC. When building a new PC the hard drive you install will not include an installation of Windows.

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