There are a lot of programs around to help you download Windows 10 ISO and prepare bootable USB. However, only the official Media Creation Tool can both download the Windows 10 ISO and prepare the bootable USB using the downloaded ISO. While the official Media Creation Tool is quite good, it doesn’t prepare the bootable USB as fast as the popular Rufus software.
Rufus is fast with user friendly interface, available in many languages, and updated very often. Good news is that you no longer need to use the Media Creation Tool or any other software to do that. Rufus can do it for you as it can download Windows 10 ISOs from Microsoft servers and prepare the bootable USB.
Here is how to use Rufus to download Windows 10 and then prepare a bootable USB:
Step 1: Connect an 8GB+ USB drive which you would like to make a bootable USB.
Step 2: Download Rufus EXE. or its Portable version . In addition to the regular installer, a portable version of Rufus is also available for users who don’t want to install the program.
Step 3: In the Device drop-down box, select your USB drive. Select Disk or ISO image from the Boot selection drop down box, click the small down arrow next to the Select button and then be sure to select the Download option.
Step 4: Now, click the Download button to download the Figo script which once downloaded will display the following dialog where you need to select Windows 10 (or Windows 8.1 if you wish to download it) and then click OK button to see a list of Windows 10 versions.
Select the latest version of Windows 10, click the OK button again, select the edition of Windows 10 (Home, Pro or Education), click the Continue button, select the language, click Continue again, and then select the architecture (32-bit or 64-bit).
Step 5: Finally, click the Download button, select a location to save the ISO file and then click the Save button to begin downloading the Windows 10 ISO file. If you would like to use a web browser to download the ISO, you can do so by selecting Download using browser option.
Step 6: Once the ISO is downloaded, click the START button to format the connected USB drive and make it as bootable USB.
Changes in Rufus 4.8:
- Switch to wimlib for all WIM image processing:
- Greatly speeds up image analysis when opening Windows ISOs
- Can speed up Windows To Go drive creation (But won’t do miracles if you have a crap drive)
- Might help with Parallels limitations on Mac (But Rufus on Parallels is still UNSUPPORTED)
- Enables the splitting of >4GB files with Alt-E (But still WAY SLOWER than using UEFI:NTFS)
- Switch to using Visual Studio binaries everywhere, due to MinGW DLL delay-loading limitations
- Add more exceptions for Linux ISOs that restrict themselves to DD mode (Nobara, openSUSE, …)
- Improve reporting of UEFI bootloaders in the log, with info on the Secure Boot status
- Fix an issue with size limitations when writing an uncompressed VHD back to the same drive
- Fix a crash when opening the log with the 32-bit MinGW compiled version.
Homepage – https://rufus.ie