Computer Safety Tip

Installing Windows 7 onto your Netbook – 3 simple steps

March 8, 2010 Windows 7 Tips

Notebooks come complete devoid of DVD drives and optical drives, so how would one install Windows 7 one might ask? Well, here are three easy ways how to do just that:

The less traditional method would be to download the Windows 7 Release Candidate file, free of charge, directly from Microsoft — complete with a one-year validity period.

There are alternative methods however, for a longer lasting effect.

1. Buy a USB DVD drive.This is by far the easiest solution, and it may alleviate the problem for all future installations, which may be CDs or DVDs. I’ve seen external drives selling in the $40-50 range on eBay. Shop around and you may be able to snag one for as little as $20.
2. USB flash driveYou will need at least 4GB of storage space, you can then make the flash drive  bootable using the open-source Live USB Helper utility, then use the free Daemon Tools Lite to “mount” the ISO file to the drive. With that done, you would need to boot the Netbook, with the flash drive plugged in and select it as the boot device.

   Important to bear in mind: installing Windows from a flash drive can be very time-consuming–and the aforementioned setup steps are not recommended for the computer novice.

3. If you have an external hard drive, you can copy the ISO to it and boot from there, just like the with flash drive. This method doesn’t involve buying a DVD drive, and is much faster, too.

So, there you have it!

Good luck, and remember — always back up all yoru data before attempting to tamper any system settings.

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Tags: 3 simple steps, Installing, Installing Windows 7, Netbook, Windows 7