WinSetupFromUSB Editor's Review

Install Windows from a USB Stick with this cool utility.


Installing Windows isn't as easy as it used to be. Back in the day, all you needed to do was stick a CD or DVD in your optical drive, turn the PC on, and let it rip.  Windows usually installed and was ready to go in under an hour.  Today, it isn't as easy.  Many PC's no longer have optical drives; and its not as convenient to carry optical discs as it was years ago.  Today, USB or thumb drives area LOT easier to carry and often have tons more space than a CD or even DVD. Installing or even reinstalling Windows is a lot easier when you can put the install files on a thumb drive, but its not always easy to get your computer to boot from that drive. Thankfully, with WinSetupFromUSB, it’s a lot easier. It’s a cool utility for your Windows PC.

If you want or need to have your Windows setup files with you on the go, this is a cool little utility to help you put it together on a USB or thumb drive. Install the utility, mount your ISO file as a drive on your PC and then format the thumb drive with a single partition.  The tool will help you format the thumb drive and make it bootable

After your drive is formatted and ready, you specify the location of your Windows source/install files (the ISO you mounted earlier) and specify the destination as your formatted thumb drive.  You then let the app copy all of the files to the thumb drive.  You can even test the drive in QEMU, a specialized process emulator.


App Pro’s: Free, pretty much automates the entire process

App Con’s: Must have the appropriate Windows install media and licenses before proceeding, wasn't easy for me to get things working right

Conclusion: I had trouble getting the application to work. The tool wouldn't complete the format of my 8GB thumb drive correctly and it wouldn't work with Windows 7 or Windows 8 media. I'm not sure if that was me, the app, or the fact that I'm running Windows via a VM.  You may have to play with this a bit in order to get things to work for you, so be prepared to spend a bit of time.  This is not necessarily a turn key solution for creating portable install media for everyone.