The era of optical discs is already passing away, just like it once happened with floppy disks. New carriers of information appear, they are much more productive, faster, more spacious. And even software in recent years has been sold not on disks, but in images (download from the official website and install on your computer). Fortunately, the Internet around the world is almost high-speed. But how, having a system image and a flash drive, can you install it on your PC?
Writing an image to a USB flash drive
If you have a new computer, then everything is quite simple - turn on support for UEFI mode, format the USB flash drive in FAT32, copy all files from the system image to it. By the way, you can open a file with the *.iso extension using programs such as UltraISO or WinRar.
But if the computer is old and boots by means of BIOS, you will have to write the image to a flash drive using third-party software. The same UltraISO will do, but it's much easier to work with Rufus. On the example of the latter, the image recording looks like this:
- Run the program and select the drive (if there is only one, it will be selected automatically).
- Specify the logical volume schema. So, for older PCs, you need to specify UEFI-CSM or MBR for PCs with BIOS. And for newer models - GPT.
- You do not need to change the cluster size and volume label.
- Check the box "Quick format" - this will save time on cleaning the system.
- Click "Start". And that's all, now it remains only to wait 10-20 minutes until the recording on the USB flash drive is completed.
As soon as the recording is over, you can start installing Windows on your computer or laptop.
System installation procedure
So, having an image of the system recorded on a USB flash drive, you can proceed with the installation. To do this, perform the following manipulations:
- Insert a USB flash drive into a free USB port and reboot.
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Using the boot Boot menu, select the installed USB flash drive as the boot disk.
Selecting a drive to install - As soon as the message "Press any key to boot from CD / DVD" appears, you just need to press any button on the keyboard.
- Next, select the OS language, time, date, display format, keyboard layout. Usually at this stage you do not have to select anything, everything remains by default.
- Go to the next screen and click the "Install" button. Next, you need to enter the license key. If it is not there, then press the corresponding button.
- Now you need to read the license agreement and install the system to disk. Please note that you can choose to update the system - this will move all the old files to the Windows.old folder. It is quite possible that in this case the license will be picked up from the old OS (after all, you are using a licensed product that is only being updated). Selective option - in this case you install a clean system, it will not contain any files from the old one (if, of course, you format the disk partition).
- Next, you need to specify the disk partition where the system will be located. As soon as you carry out the formatting, you need to click the "Next" button. All necessary files will be copied to disk. After that, the system will begin to optimize to perform the first launch.
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At the next step, choose a layout, region, connect to an existing network, set up Internet access.
System installation process - Next, you set up an account, set a PIN code if you wish, and at the very end, the privacy settings are configured.
Further actions will not require your intervention, the system will configure and launch itself. As you can see, installing the top ten on a computer is not very difficult, the main thing is to write the image to a USB flash drive.
