One walk, start to finish — bootable USB, every blue setup screen in order, the first sign in, and the moment the desktop appears. No skipped steps, and the one screen that can erase your data is flagged before you reach it.
Most install guides either rush the screens or stop at the desktop and call it done. This one does the whole walk in order: prepare the USB, boot from it, answer every setup screen correctly, survive the restarts, and finish the first sign in. Where this guide ends, the post-install optimization guide begins — the link is at the end.
Drive 0 Partition 1: System Reserved .... 100 MB (example)
Drive 0 Partition 2 .................... 476 GB (example)
Drive 0 Unallocated Space .............. 58 GB (example)
The drive selection screen — the one screen in setup that can erase data. Sizes above are examples; your drives will differ.
A working PC to prepare the media, an empty USB drive of 8 GB or more, and about half an hour. Download the official Media Creation Tool from Microsoft's Windows download page — it builds the bootable USB for you. If you are reinstalling over an old Windows, back up your files first: a clean install erases the drive you choose. The full pre-install checklist has its own page in this guide.
Plug in the USB, restart the PC and open the one-time boot menu. The key depends on the maker — F12 on most Dell machines, F9 on HP, F8 or Esc on many others. Pick the USB drive from the list. On newer PCs leave Secure Boot on — official Microsoft media boots fine with it. If the PC boots back into the old Windows, the boot menu key was missed; restart and try again.
Every setup screen, one by one, is explained on its own page in this guide.
Setup offers Upgrade and Custom. Upgrade keeps your files and apps but also keeps most problems. For a clean setup choose Custom: Install Windows only. Then comes the drive screen shown above. Identify your drive by its size, not its number. For a truly clean start, delete the old Windows partitions on that drive until it shows as unallocated space, select it and click Next — Setup creates the small system partitions it needs by itself.
Now Setup copies files and restarts the PC a few times. This is normal. Do not switch the PC off, and on a laptop keep the charger plugged in. One classic trap: if the PC boots back into the USB and shows the first setup screen again, simply remove the USB drive and restart — the install continues from the hard drive.
After the restarts, Windows asks for your region and keyboard, then wants a network connection. On current Windows 11 Home builds, setup expects an internet connection and a Microsoft account sign in. You then create a PIN (it stays on this PC and is quicker than typing the password) and meet a page of privacy switches — each one is explained in plain words on the first sign in page of this guide. Skip the optional offers you do not need; none of them are required to finish.
That is a finished install. What comes next — updates and drivers in the right order, privacy pass, bloat cleanup and backup setup — is covered in depth in our new Windows install setup and optimization guide.
The full setup — bootable USB, every install screen and the first sign in — shown live, step by step.
▶️ Watch Full VideoOn an SSD the file-copy stage usually finishes in 15 to 25 minutes, and the first sign in takes about 10 more. On an old hard disk the same install can take two or three times longer. The updates that arrive after the desktop are separate and can take longer than the install itself.
A clean Custom install erases the drive or partition you select on the drive screen. That is why the backup comes first. Drives you do not select are not touched — but picking the wrong drive is the one mistake in setup that cannot be undone.
No. Choose I don't have a product key and install the same edition the PC was activated with before — Windows activates itself online once you reach the desktop. A different edition, or a PC that never had Windows, needs its own key.