Book Chapter 11 - Building a PC

1. Boot from Everything

I love operating systems. In fact, I'm a collector of operating systems. Would you like to see my collection? Well, you sure can. Take a look right here on my system. So, for example, I'm a big fan of Ubuntu Linux, and if you look through, I've got all these different versions of Ubuntu, and some of them go way back. Over here I've got copies of Windows Seven and eight and eight one. There’s even a copy of Vista in there. And if you really want to see a mess, here’s all my different versions of Windows Ten. Now, if you look at these, they look like files stored on a server someplace. But what you're really looking at are what are called ISO images. An ISO image is a perfect copy of what was originally optical media. So the idea was back in the old days, and still today, I've got a Windows 10 on DVD right The assumption here is that you bought an operating system or acquired an operating system by purchasing or acquiring optical media. Optical media has been installing operating systems since before 1995, so that gives you an idea of how long this has been around.

Now, when you install an operating system onto a hard drive, what you're actually doing is a lot more than simply copying some files onto the drive. Remember, the operating system has to be in the partition tables, and it has to pick them up once the system bias has said you're good to go. So the actual process of installing an operating system is well. Yeah, there's a lot of copying, sure, and a lot of setting up, but it also puts itself in the position on your hard drive partition table so it can begin to load once your system bias is done. So we do a lot of installing stuff. So the trick here is to use ISO images everywhere to do everything. If I want to make a bootable optical media, I have to get an ISO, and then I have to go through a process called burning it to put it on there. Now, the only downside to optical media I wouldn't say it's a downside, but because it's becoming more common, we're starting to see stuff like this. So here's a copy of Windows Ten Home. No, it's not a CD Remit’s actually just a little tiny thumb drive, and that's what I used to install it. Now on this thumb drive is an ISO image of exactly what's on here. It's just that thumb drives have become more common and fewer people have optical media, so that can be an issue. If I want to make bootable media, I have to get an ISO from somewhere, and then I take that ISO and burn it onto these different types of media. So we burn onto optical media, but actually the term even fades down into things like USB thumb drives, or if you want to use an SD card, almost any kind of media like that.

We still tend to use the word "burn," although it really only makes sense for optical media. So, a couple of things I want to show you here. First of all, if you take a look at these, they are ISOs. Number one. Windows recognizes these as disc image files, but it doesn't show something that I have actually turned on so you can see it. And what I'm going to do is unhide extensions for known file types. Now watch what happens when I do this. Do you see the ISO? Any file that ends with Islands notice how big they are. These are big, big files because they're going to fill up either the equivalent of a CD or a DVD. I guess there's ISO for Blu-ray, but I've never actually used that. So anyway, there are a couple of cool things you can do with an ISO. First of all, in most operating systems, certainly Windows, if you want to see the contents of an ISO, you can go through the process of mounting it. I just right-clicked on it and selected Mount, and this is what actually shows up. If I were to go through the process of burning, these are the actual files that are set up, ready to go, so that it would install Windows for me. Now, that's great, but I want to actually go through the burn process. Now, Windows makes this fairly easy. I want to unmount this guy. We'll eject him. So I want to go ahead and burn one of these. Windows does make it pretty easy. So, for example, these are my Ubuntu versions.

I can pick up any arbitrary version of Ubuntu, and Windows has burned a disc image ready to go. Now, if you have an ISO, it will automatically assume you've got your optical media and it's a CD or a DVD and you've got it plopped in there, and it will make an actual installation disc from that ISO. So if I needed to install Ubuntu through optical media, this is how I would do it. Setting it up in Windows That happens a lot. Ubuntu has all the same features. All versions of Linux have the same features. So it's actually pretty trivial to make bootable media when you have optical stuff because every operating system has something built into it as long as you have the ISO. Speaking of ISO, let me show you something. Right now, I'm on the Ubuntu website and I want to download a copy of Ubuntu. So when I click on this, I'm going to actually do this, so I want you to look in the lower left hand corner. It downloads. Do you see what that is? It's an ISO file. all versions of Linux, all distros. If you want that version, you go to their website, and you download the ISO that you're interested in. It is also available for download on Microsoft Windows. Windows will let you download an ISO of Windows, so you can make your own bootable media, but when you install, you better have a CD key, otherwise it won't completely work. So it's easy to get ISOs.

Making them for optical media is easy. I want to do something now though, and it's even more fun. I want to make some ISO and I want to put it on a thumb drive. So I've got a thumb drive plugged into my system right now, and in this case we're going to have to use some type of tool. The tool I know and love is called Rufus. So here's. Good old Rufus. Rufus is totally free. It's extremely well known and it is a great tool when you want to burn an ISO onto a thumb drive. So right now it sees my one thumb drive right there. So it's a two gigabit thumb drive and it's saying, what do you want to boot from? And I'm going to say, "Well, I want an ISO image, so I'm going to select an ISO image." Now in this particular case, I have a copy of the popular Linux Mint, which is a nice distribution a lot of people like to use, sitting on my desktop there. So I'm going to select that and what it's going to do is it's going to take this ISO and it's going to turn my thumb drive into a perfectly bootable little thumb drive, just like the Windows ones there. So I'm going to just go ahead and hit the start. It even has some little options here. It's like, "Oh no, wait a minute." This particular version of Linux that you're trying to make an ISO of needs a particular file. Do you want me to go online and download it for you? And it just does it automatically. And here you have a look. It says to write in ISO image mode, which is the common way.

Linux also has something called DD, which we talked about in other episodes, but we're going to just do ISO. Warning, warning, you're going to lose it all and it's going to go ahead and make an ISO image. Once I've got that, I now have a thumb drive, and we'll say it's a bootable thumb drive, I can put that onto a new system. For example, you know what? The hard drive is completely blank as long as I set my boot order. That's what always gets us in trouble here. Get your boot order. So you're booting to that thumb drive and it will automatically go, "Hello, I'm Linux Mint." Would you like me to install it on the hard drive? And you just go, it's really easy and does an absolutely great job. These tools also work with Rufus, for example. It works perfectly. You've got an SD and you want to boot to that as long as you have a boot order in your bias. A lot of biases won't let you boot to flash media. But if it does, you can go ahead, Rufus, you plug this in, burn it, and make yourself a nice bootable SD. Almost anything will work. In fact, people who use Raspberry Pi, for example, don't have hard drives in their little computers. They just have little SD cards. So it's very common to download what they call the Rasping distribution. And they use Rufus to go ahead and make something a little too tiny. It's a micros, but they make it bootable.

They put it in through their Raspberry Pi's, and it just boots up pretty cool. Okay, there are other ways to boot. One other way to boot that I want to make sure you're aware of is over a network. There are two big options when it comes to booting over a network. There's the universal thing that's called PXE booting, and then there's also Apple's Net boot. Now, these types of boot functions require you to get into your system, set up, and you'll say, "Look, I don't want to boot from my hard drive or a thumb drive or anything." I want to boot from the network. And depending on your solution, you can often just type in a network address and hit Enter, and it will automatically boot from an appropriately configured server somewhere else on your network. Now, luckily for us, we don't have to go into server configuration in Apus, talk to me in Network Plus, but you can actually boot from a network itself. This is very popular for what we call "discus workstations" or "thin clients," where we don't even bother putting in a hard drive.

It just does a PXE boot. And all of a sudden, you're in Windows and you're like, "Wow, that's cool. All right. Now, there is one other way to boot. This is kind of unique to Windows, and I want to make sure you're aware of this. Built into every copy of Windows is the ability to basically make your own installation disk. You don't even have to get an ISO or anything. The reason behind this is that Windows, if you've got a big problem, wants you to be able to put in a disc and boot to it. And the Windows, it's really a copy of the Windows installation disc that will boot up and go, hey, wait a minute. I see there's a copy of Windows already installed on your hard drive. Would you like me to fix it? And it's called the Windows Recovery Environment, or Win reflect me show you how to make one of those. First of all, you're going to have to have a thumb drive, and this is in the control panel. And all we do is create a recovery drive and it'll say, "What do you want to put in there?" I always want to back up all my system files as well. You usually need about a 16 gigabyte thumb drive to make these guys work. So make sure you have a nice big drive. This is going to take a while. I'm just going to let it run. It's going to go and say, "OH, I see you have a thumb drive." Do you want me to put it there? And you go, "Yes." From then on, any time you're working with a Mike Myers system, you're always going to notice the drive that's taped up on the monitor. It's because I've made a recovery drive. If I ever have a problem with this system, I'm not fumbling around looking for my original installation media. I've got my own little thumb drive. It's ready to go to save me in case something goes wrong.

2. Installing Windows

So you want to install your first copy of Microsoft Windows. Well, congratulations. Before you start the installation, there are some things you need to do that I call the pre-installation task. Number one, do you have enough firepower to run Windows? So right here I've got from the Microsoft website the minimum hardware requirements to run. This is Windows ten. So if you take a look, a 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM for 32 bit, 2GB for 64 bit, a 16 gigabyte drive for 32-bit OS, and a 32 GB for 64 bit OS DirectX Nine graphics card, that would be 1999. Maybe, I don't know, 800 by 600 display. And they really want you to have an Internet connection.

These are laughable minimum requirements. You couldn't get Windows to run with this, but you might be able to get it to crawl. I would recommend much higher requirements than this. In particular, around 8GB of RAM might be a good idea. And for hard drive space, I would like to see a minimum of a quarter terabyte, if not all the way up to a full terabyte. All right. So anyway, make sure you're aware of at least these minimums. You'll probably see them on the exam. Now the other thing I want to talk about is hardware. So you've got the minimum requirements, but you've got this Asus motherboard, or you've got this Adaptec controller, or you've got some other device that you're stamping in. Is that going to work with Windows? Well, Microsoft always has some kind of list. I always call it the hardware compatibility list. You can look them up online and see if they're compatible. There are a lot of different names for this thing. Right now, I think it's called the Windows Compatibility Program. But the bottom line is that there are ways to look online. The other thing you can do is type in the name of that device and see what other people are doing with it. So if you've got a new Nvidia graphics card, go to the Nvidia forums and see what people are doing with your version of Windows you're interested in installing.

So doing a little research is what it boils down to. At an enterprise level, this gets a lot more serious. You're about to buy 100 new Dell laptops, and if you get it wrong, things are going to get you in trouble. In that case, the hardware manufacturers will work directly with you by talking to your representative to verify that whatever you're buying is going to work with your version of Windows. Okay, so you've got all this hardware in front of you and it's all plugged in, ready to go, and you have a high degree of confidence it's going to work. So we actually want to start the installation process. There are a couple of things you want to know ahead of time. One, you need to know your network. Now, if you're just installing it at home, it's no big deal. You probably just have a default workgroup. No big deal. But if you're in an office environment, you could be in a domain and you might have to set this computer up to be in a domain. And in that case, you often have very standardized naming conventions that are used within your organization. And you also probably have a standard domain account or even know how to organize a local account for this computer. If anything I just said to you is confusing, don't panic. We cover all this stuff in more detail in other episodes. We're just worried about what we're going to have to type in while we're installing Windows. The last thing I'm going to mention, and this might be heresy, is that Microsoft, in particular, really wants you to make the Microsoft account your online account, which connects to your cloud services and all that. The only downside to these cloud accounts is that if you ever forget your password, you could be in real trouble because the only way to recover your password is to be online. So it can be a bit of a double-edged sword.

I recommend creating a local account when you're installing Windows and during this demonstration we're going to be creating a local account that we have complete control of. So with that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and let's install some Windows here. I'm going to go and plug this in. We're going to boot off this guy and start the installation process. Welcome to your Windows installation. Now the first thing Windows 10 asks is going to be what language do you want to install your time and currency format and your keyboard or input method? So you think about this. This would probably be a really good thing to get up front because folks in Germany would probably prefer to see this in their native language and in their time and currency formats. Also, if I've got a German keyboard here, I'd like my Umlouts and all those crazy German characters to work. So here I am in the US. So the defaults are fine. Now this next step is an important one. It looks like a single button where you just hit Install. If you look down here, you can also go through a process known as computer repair. Now we'll cover this in other episodes, but the main way is if you have a Windows system that won't boot, you just boot off of any installation media and go to this option. But for now, we'll just do an install. All right. Now the first thing you're going to have to do is you have to have a legitimate copy of Windows. So you actually have to have the appropriate CD key to type in. And it's going to be 25 alphanumeric characters, and you can see they show the actual sample right here. I like you guys a lot, but not enough to give away a product key for Microsoft Windows. So you can actually get around this momentarily by saying, "I don't have a product key." What's going to happen here?

It's going to allow us to install Windows. However, we're not going to be activated or deactivated. Windows systems will stop working after a set amount of time. They won't be updated and things like that. No problem. We'll put in the key later. So I'm going to install Windows. Ten Pro. And of course, we want to carefully read those licence terms. By the way, if you ever get the chance to read them, they're absolutely terrifying. OK, now this page right here is a big deal right now. So what it's saying is, do you want to upgrade or do you want to do a customer? A clean install upgrade means any applications, anything, documents you might have, anything like that, will be kept. It'll just upgrade the operating system, which means a clean install. We're going to talk about some of the upgrade issues in another episode. All right, so let's go ahead and start installing. So right now, it sees only one blank drive with unallocated space. So we're going to go ahead and install it and then we will begin the fun part. That often takes a while. So it's right now I'm copying tones of files down, getting ready to get all this set up. And this is going to take a moment. Oh, look, something's happened, or maybe not. It's going to take a few reboots. Be patient. Hi there. I'm Cortana. And I'm here to help.

Look, I have no problem. Cortana is the "talk to your computer" function. It works pretty well, actually. I've got no problem with it. Cortana will try to march us through this installation process, and I'm just going to go ahead and ignore it and turn the volume down. Let's start with the region. Yep, I'm in the United States. Do I want us? Keyboard? Yes, I do. Do I want a second keyboard? Nope, just one. Fine. They already asked for a keyboard layout during the install, and now they're asking for it again. I don't know. Thanks, Microsoft. What he's asking right now is, are we going to just set this up using basically a default work group or are we going to set it up for an organization? Are you in a domain or something like that? So I'm going to go ahead and set this up for an organization. By the way, I even set it up for an organisation when I'm at home. It gives me a couple more options that I really like. Oh, look, we're waiting again. OK, here we go. So first of all, Microsoft really, really, really wants you to sign in with an online Microsoft account. So what you can do instead is right here. See where it says "Domain join?" Click on that even if you're not joining a domain. The whole goal here during a Windows install is to create a local user account. And Microsoft really doesn't want you to do that. They really want you to have an online account and all that stuff. Now we can go ahead and type in a name. Now look in the lower left hand corner. I'm telling you, they really want you to join online. So we're going to give this account a name.

Keep it real simple again. Now here is where, if you were in an organization, they might require you to type something in particular. So we're going to create a super memorable password. Yep, real complicated. And let's make sure we're typing in the right password and the summary security questions. Here's my first pet's name. Timmy security question number two. What was your childhood nickname? Tibet. Question number three: What was the city where you were born? Tibet. Okay, now I'm doing this for personal use, and a lot of people do exactly what I've done. Here is where you have all of these different security questions and you just pick one word for it. Maybe for a Windows install. That's not that big a deal, but you might not want to consider doing things like that for your banking account security questions anyway. So do we want to use Cortana? Well, I'm not playing Halo, so I'm going to decline. Now here's where we're going to get into the infamous Windows telemetry. So this is a matter of personal choice. I give enough away as it is, my Android phone, so I'm going to say no. Most of these options are actually incredibly convenient, but they are going to give away some telemetry and some of your personal information back up to Microsoft. Things like knowing where your location is Well, for my desktop, maybe that's not such a big deal. If I'm going to use Cortana, it wants to store voice information.

If I want to use inking where I'm using handwriting, it's going to want to store information like that. It also says, "Do you want me to tailor your ads?" I don't know about you. It's bad enough that I get ads in my web browser and that Microsoft now puts ads on my desktop as a little bit of a challenge. So let me show you what I did with this page. No, no, no. No, no. He really wants to stay there. You can make your own choices here. A lot of people have looked at this telemetry. Microsoft does a good job with security. It is not identifiable to you as a person. But, you know, it's a matter of personal choice here. Okay, we're waking up. Yay. Okay, It sees my network. Whenever I see that blue bar, it means Windows sees a new network. I'm going to say Do I want to be discoverable? Oh, yeah. All right, so this is how Windows 10 is currently opening up by opening up the Edge browser because they really want you to get all over the browser as well. So that is the default Windows installation. So if you think you're done, you're not. All we've done up to this point is get Windows with the default installation. We've got a million jobs to do that are so important. I separate them into a different episode called Post Installation Tasks.

3. Post-Installation Tasks

Once you've installed Windows onto a system, that’s where the real work begins. So in this section, which I call Post Installation Tasks, these are all the little jobs we've got to do after Windows is installed. So the first place we want to head over to is Device Manager. When you do an initial install, Windows has tons, tons, and tones of device drivers in there. But if you take a look, you'll see that we show a couple of errors here, and they're invariably really scary errors, like base system device or Southbridge controller or core system. What you're looking at here is that there's stuff on the motherboard itself that Windows simply doesn't recognize. And in that case, what we've got to do is we've got to find the optical media that comes with this motherboard and we have to go through the process of installing it. This can take a while and a lot of times, especially if you're buying a motherboard that's a couple of years old. It's still a great motherboard, but the drivers themselves are probably a little bit obsolete even on here. So then what we end up doing is having to go online. So all I did was a quick search of the model of this particular motherboard and I found the manufacturer's website. They all have these. So this one wants me to choose an operating system.

So I've got Windows 10 64 bit, and you can see that there are a lot of drivers that are here, and I promise you, these are much newer than the ones on the motherboard driver disk. So the trick here is grabbing a thumb drive. I usually have to go to another system because a lot of times even the network card isn't working on a new Windows install. Go to another system, grab a thumb drive, download all the drivers, then plug that into your new system and start installing all this stuff. There are a million ways to do it. A lot of them will have a default. One screen will come up and it'll say, "Here's all the different things, and it's going to be like the core stuff." There's going to be one for like your SATA, and there's going to be one for Raid if that's available. There's usually one for audio and they break them down into three, four, up to ten different subsections. You just install them all. Oh, and by the way, don't install the extra web browser and other garbage that they tend to put in these types of installs. The bottom line is that you're going to have to take a good amount of time installing all of the different motherboard drivers, and that's a normal course of events. The other big issue is with the video cards themselves. Video cards have amazing capabilities, and their device drivers tend to be updated quite a bit.

A lot of times, Windows will not recognize your device driver or it will put in a data device driver. In that case, once again, you're reduced to grabbing optical media and doing an update. But if you're me, I always go to the manufacturer and get the latest drivers for my video card to make sure that they're in good order. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and start doing all this updating. Give me a minute. When I get back, we should have a very pretty device manager. All right, so it's taken me a few tries, but I've been installing device drivers for a while now, and all of a sudden, things are already looking prettier. Notice that the resolution of the screen seems f a sudden How pretty is that? You have to take your time with these device drivers. It just takes a while as you go through them or when you go online to download them. Whatever you've got to do, just make sure you take your time and you get them. The ultimate test is pretty simple. Open up Device Manager and see how it looks. Now that is a pretty device manager. In fact, it's a little small. It's a good thing I've got a high resolution monitor here. But what's important is that even at this resolution, I can quickly see I don't have any more exclamation points.

All of the hardware is in the system. Windows recognizes it and it has good device drivers. Now, just because the hardware is working correctly, there's some other stuff we need to be doing now. In particular, we need to prepare for problems in the future. So the first thing I want to do is make sure that my Windows itself is updated. I think I can make these icons a little bit bigger. So let's fire up Windows Update. Well, it's a brand new install, so there are no updates available yet. However, this is where I want to go ahead and make sure that I've got my active hours. When are the times I don't want this thing to update? So, between 08:00 A.M. and 05:00 P.M., by default, it's never going to try to restart the device or anything like that.

You can also set up some advanced options here. For example, you can update other Microsoft products. For example, if you have Office online, you can automatically download the updates, even over metered data connections. So you might want to be careful about showing a notification. I like to have that one show up because I want to see if it's going to reboot and then I can actually pause updates. Now this brings up a really, really important issue with Windows, in particular Windows 10. You don't have the option to not accept updates. They just happen. There is no ability for you to absolutely shut down updates. The only way you can do that is if you use a very specific version of Windows called Windows Enterprise, and you're not going to go to the store and buy one of those. Those are only for large enterprise customers. So the bottom line is that you will get updates. You can pause them for a while, but you're never, ever going to stop them. All right, so it looks like I've got all my update options set up pretty well. I'm happy with that. The next thing I want to start talking about is the concept of what I call a recovery disk. So let me show you how to do that.

So a recovery drive is simply your personal copy of Windows installation media. Now, you can also back up the system files to the recovery drive. This particular option isn't that critical. We will cover this in other episodes when we're talking about repairing windows. But for now, I'm just going to turn it off and it's going to take a minute. But what it's going to do is look for a flash drive. And by the way, that flash drive has to be 16GB to do this. And it's going to go ahead and basically make Windows installation media. Now, you might say to yourself, "Well, Mike, I've got my original installation media." Why would I want another? Well, because we protect this. This goes in a closet and we don't touch it. We leave it alone. So we have our own copy and will keep that around. So that's the first thing you want to do. The next thing we want to do is create a restore point. A restore point is kind of like a snapshot of my system as it currently is. So what I've got right now is a Windows system that is properly installed. I've got all my device drivers in there. It's updating, which is great, but there are no applications. There's nothing in here.

The restore point we're going to create basically says, "I want a copy of how it is right now." So if I have a problem in the future, I can come back to this point. This is particularly important during your installation tasks because we're notorious for installing bad applications that do donky things and lock up computers. And I want to be able to get back to where I was before. So let's go ahead and make a restore point. So to make a restore point, all we need to do is we're going to turn on what we call system protection. So this will allow us to make restoration points. Now we can actually set how much drive space we actually have. The problem is, restore points can be a little bit large. So we're just going to leave that alone for right now. Hit okay. And now I can create a restore point. Now we must give it a descriptive name. I just installed Windows ten, although I normally include a date as well. However, all of the restore points are timestamped, so it's not really critical. So it's now going to make this restore point. Now I'm going to hopefully never have to use it as the best example. But if I ever run into a situation, particularly when I'm doing my initial application instals and my system's locking up or acting weird, I can just go back to that restore point and try again, figure out what's wrong with my applications.

Okay, now the next thing we have to do is almost a non issue. I just want to bring it up because Windows does this automatically, and that's antimalware and point and try Setting up your anti-malware and your firewall is handled all under your Windows security settings. So let's go ahead and open up Windows security. And right now you can see that everything's got a green checkbox because basically everything's preinstalled. If you get Windows 10 today, it comes with anti-malware not only installed but working properly. It has a firewall setup so that if some programmer tries to start talking outside and you don't want it to, you can catch it. It does a really good job by default. The only time this becomes interesting at all is if something goes wrong and you need to fix it. For example, there is no such thing as a perfect antimalware tool. And sometimes you might have a problem where you need to go in and turn off your antivirus. We have huge episodes that cover all this, but this is something we do right at the beginning. And these days it's really just a check away. Yep, everything looks good. Okay, one more thing, and we're done with our post installation tasks, is something called file history. File history is a tool that allows you to keep backup copies of anything you're changing now. I mean, on a file-by-file basis. So right now, file history is turned off. It is turned off by default. So I want to get this turned on, and it's going to take a while. I'm not going to sit here and stare at this. So that's a lot of post installation tasks. Many of us technicians, It takes us longer to do the post installation tasks than the actual installation of Windows itself.

4. Windows Installation options

There are a lot of different ways to install Windows on a system. And in this episode, I want to talk about the Windows installation options you have out there. Now the simplest one we have is called a "clean install." With a clean install, you're starting with blank storage and you put Windows installation media in and you install from it onto that blank media. Equally It could be a drive that has an old copy of Linux on it or something like that. And you do a clean install by wiping that drive and then installing Windows. The other option you have is what we call an upgrade install. You've already got an existing copy of an old Windows Seven computer laying around, or an old Windows Eight computer, and you want to upgrade it to Windows Ten.

You can do that, but the only thing you need to remember is that an upgrade basically keeps all your stuff. So you've got your applications, you've got your sign on, you've got your pretty desktop the way you want it, and all you want to do is go from, say, Windows Seven to Windows Ten. You have to be careful with this because Microsoft creates some limitations in general. The big thing you need to remember is that if you have an older home version, you're only going to be able to upgrade to the Windows 10 home version. If you have an older professional or workstation, depending on what version it is, you'll only be able to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro. You were to say to me, "Well Mike, I've got an old Windows Seven home system and I want to upgrade to Windows Ten Pro." I'm saying you can, but you're going to be doing a clean install and I hope you've kept all of your applications and everything because they're going to need to be reinstalled as well. So that's one way to do it. But there are some more interesting options. A very rarely used option is something called multibit. So let's assume I have a system that's got one C drive in it. And now this C drive has got a copy of Windows Server.

It's some other version of Windows. Now what I want to do is I want to multi boot, so I can boot to either Windows ten or to this. So in order to multi boot number one, I'm going to have to have some extra hard drives. I could install another hard drive, for example. But if I wanted to, I could actually use some of the partitioned space on the primary drive. So either way, it works just fine. Windows 10 will be in the boot information at the beginning. And then once I do this installation, every time I boot up this computer, I'll get a really cool looking screen that looks like this. As you can see, I had the option of booting into Windows Server or Windows Ten. This is a classic example of multibit for a lot of us. We're doing installations for lots of systems. At one time, I'll have 25 laptops come in and I want these laptops to be customized so that people can put in their username and their password. But on the same token, I want everybody's keyboards, for example, to be preconfigured for these types of situations. We do what's called an unattended installation. The idea behind an unattended installation is that we generate something called an answer file.

This answer file basically answers as many of those questions during the installation as possible, depending on our needs. And then it will only pop up the screens that are necessary for the particular user. For example, one of the things I might do is they get to type in their own username and password, but everything else is already set up for them. To do this, we use a tool called the Windows System Image Manager. I've got a copy of it right here. So this is a free tool that comes from Microsoft, and you go through and you set up a bunch of fairly esoteric and complicated things. It takes some practice to get the tool, but the end result is that you create a file called autounattendot XML. This file is then put into this ISO. This is a regular Windows installation. All I have to do is drag this in here and the moment I boot up with this little thumb drive, it's going to read that autounattend XML. And anything that I've preinstalled won't even show up during the installation process. So when you have a lot of systems but you want people to have a little flexibility in terms of how they want to customize a few things, these can be absolutely amazing tools. Now there's another way to do it and this gets a little bit more complicated. Let's come up with a situation where I've got a whole bunch of new computers. So I've got a whole bunch of new laptops. No, I didn't draw that many here, but imagine this could be potentially hundreds of laptops. All the laptops are identical. That's an important point, folks. The hardware has to be identical. Okay? Now what I can do is I can take one laptop and I can install Windows on it. I can even install applications.

I can even set desktops and have them join domains and have this thing perfectly set up. And then what I'll do, and this is invariably done on a network, is I'll then distribute the image of that system to all of the other computers and simultaneously update all of the individual computers from that one image. As a result, this method of image deployment Now Windows has tools built in, like the user state migration tool, that would work. But a lot of us use third-party tools with names like "Ghost" and all that they do is take an image and propagate it to lots and lots of other computers. Image deployment has some real benefits over unattended. For example, I can install applications. I can set up the firewall in just certain ways, and everybody gets the exact same thing. So there are benefits to both. Just make sure you're comfortable with the difference between those two. And remember, there are a lot of different options when it comes to installing Windows. And for the exam, at least make sure you're comfortable conceptually with the ones we've just discussed.

Prepared by Top Experts, the top IT Trainers ensure that when it comes to your IT exam prep and you can count on ExamSnap CompTIA A+ Certification Exam: Core 2 certification video training course that goes in line with the corresponding CompTIA 220-1002 exam dumps, study guide, and practice test questions & answers.