As everyone knows, Windows 7 is definitely worth the upgrade. It is especially worth the upgrade if you happen to be using Windows Vista still, for whatever reason that might be, is beyond me.
If you have ever installed Vista or XP or even Windows 7 from a DVD, you know that it can sometimes be a consuming drag of waiting and watching status bars, well why not make things a little bit speedier the next time you need to install this 4 month old operating system? I think it’s about time you learn!
Step One
The first thing you need to do is get Windows 7. It doesn’t matter the version you get, from Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Ultimate, from x68 or x64, it just simply doesn’t matter. Which makes this whole situation so much more enjoyable! Once you have the disc (or an ISO..) you need to make sure you have a few other things to make this go smoothly.
Step Two
A flash drive is important for this operation, I promise you! You will need a flash drive that is at least 4gb in size so it can fit all of the goodies on the drive, we are doing a full copy here not a “Streamlining” or what have you.
Step Three
Plug the flash drive into your computer, and make sure you know what drive letter it is assigned to (ex. Drive E:). You are then going to want to load up the Command Prompt and type in “diskpart“, which will load the utility you need to set the drive up to become bootable.
This part kind of got me mad at the beginning, because I realized I was trying to do it with XP. If you are using XP then you need to find someone who has a version of of Windows Vista or Windows 7 installed, or you need to find a copy of VMWare and use that to setup the flash drive. Sadly there is no way around this, I did a lot of research and I ended up using the VMWare method myself.
So as long as you have Vista+, have disk part loaded up, and have your flash drive and Windows 7 DVD inserted in the computer, you can continue! Awesome, right?
Step Four
Next you will want to type in “list disk” in to the command prompt where it says DISKPART>. This will show all of the disks that are attached to your computer, find out which one is the Flash Drive that you want to format. For this demonstration, let’s use Disk 5. You will then want to type “select disk 5″ in the command prompt, which will set that as the disk you are editing.
Step Five
After you have that all setup and good to go, your next step will be a long string of commands, followed one after another:
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit
What did we just do do your drive? Destroyed it!!! No, just kidding. All we did was create a primary partition, make it the active partition, and then format it with FAT32 file system. Easy!
Step Six
This is the part that seems to be the most time consuming, you need to copy all of the files from your Windows 7 DVD to your Flash Drive. It is pretty simple it just takes about 15 minutes or so to fully copy everything, but this of course depends on your system and your DVD reader. For this demonstration lets say we are going to have our DVD player set as Drive D: and our USB Drive is just one drive down the line, Drive E:.
Again:
Drive D: - DVD Player
Drive E: - USB Flash Drive
xcopy d:*.* /s/e/f e:
The drive letters may be different that yours, but that shouldn’t be a problem. If you got this far, hopefully you know the alphabet at least a small bit.
When it is done copying, it will say something along the lines of “791 File(s) copied), then give you a C: prompt again. The number of files changes depending on build, edition, etc.
Step Seven
The last and final step before you get on your merry way would be booting from the USB Drive. Lot’s of guides make you go into your BIOS to change your boot order, but I don’t really see myself booting off a Flash Drive every day, so all I do is simply Hit F11 when the computer is starting up which loads up the “One-Time Boot Menu”. You then chose the drive that you want to boot off of, every computer is different, but hopefully since you did all of the previous steps, you can figure it out from there. It isn’t always F11, on most Dell computer’s you need to hit F12, ASRock is F11, some are F8. You will have to watch your screen when you first load up the computer to double check, or even check out motherboards manual for more help.
I think that is just an all-around better way to install Windows 7, it is easier to carry around a Flash Drive, it is faster than a DVD, and it’s just easier, period. I hope this guide has helped you out some how, and I hope it makes your future a little bit.. smoother. 
