Today's GOTD is all about installing [deploying] Windows. Got me thinking that with the next version of 10 hitting RTM any day now, rolling out via Windows Update in April, might be useful to jot down some tips.
Download the ISO for any version OS & rufus, a handy free app, will put it on a bootable USB stick. What I like about rufus are the configuration options... as I've said probably too many times, booting to a USB stick can be iffy nowadays. To boot to USB with many devices you now have to go through the Windows 10 login screen, shift-clicking the off button, then wading through the optional boot menus to get to where you can reboot into bios setup.
If the system won't start to get to that screen, eventually, after failing to start however many times, win10 should trigger those optional menus itself. When you're having problems that can get old fast -- when I was having trouble with a new version of 10 with my smaller tablet I used EasyBCD to add a fake menu item to the start menu. It was listed as another copy of Windows, pointed to the SD card so wouldn't do anything, but the 15 second delay I set gave me time to select the optional boot menus.
If you just want to update win10 then mount the ISO in 10, and either run setup or copy everything to a USB stick, or a folder on your drive, & run setup. Please remember that as I posted earlier, win10 setup now uses more disk space when you upgrade versions. The idea was/is to reduce the time it takes when you reboot & go to the blue screen while everything installs. TO do that Windows creates a copy of every file & folder that will be on your disk afterward, and that takes up a lot more disk space than it used to. If you don't have a lot of free disk space, setup can use a USB stick for extra space. I suggest downloading the ISO rather than upgrading through Windows Update -- if something goes wrong, you don't have to download it all over again. And as always, backup 1st.
A fresh installation of win10 takes less time than installing Windows used to, but there are still shortcuts. Windows 10 itself is turning out to be pretty adaptable, and you can often get away doing a disk image backup of one fresh install, restoring it wherever you need another fresh install, even when the hardware doesn't match. You can also use DISM to copy the Windows system files to a hard drive, including to a VHD. Once it boots it will start adding drivers etc. to complete setup. And you can copy that applied image to any hard drive on most any system that can run that OS -- it works on 7 & 8 too. Since a fresh win7 install will take hours to update, you can also create a win7 .wim file on your hard drive, mount it, & update it there. Apply that to a drive with DISM -- again you can copy the results pretty much anywhere, e.g. via backup & restore -- and when the device boots win7 will finish setting up, & start with most all updates already in place.