Install

You can clean install Windows 11 on a PC in various ways, each of which is covered in this chapter. How you do so will depend on your needs and your situation.

You bought a new PC. Skip ahead to the section Windows Setup Out of Box Experience.
You built a PC or own a PC with no operating system. You can start right at the next section in this chapter.
You own a PC with Windows 11, but you want to reinstall it. There are several ways to accomplish what is essentially a recovery task. But the best way is to use the Reset This PC utility that’s accessible in the Settings app. You could also use the manual upgrade method described in the Upgrade chapter in which you choose “Nothing” in the Choose what to keep screen of Windows Setup.

? What you need
Before getting started, you need a way to install Windows 11. Which method you choose will depend on the state of the PC on which you’re working:

The PC works and you can boot into Windows. In this case, all you need is the latest Windows 11 disk image (ISO) file, which you can ? download for free from the Microsoft website. (That said, you can also use the second method.)

The PC doesn’t have Windows installed or can’t boot into Windows for some reason. In this case, you need to create Windows 11 installation media in the form of a bootable USB flash drive. If you have an x64 (AMD/Intel-based) PC, this can be done using a Microsoft utility called the Media Creation Tool (? also available on the Microsoft website), but I recommend using a free third-party tool called ? Rufus regardless of your PC’s system architecture. (Rufus works for Windows 11 on Arm installation media as well.) And if you are installing Windows 11 on Arm, you need to download all the drivers for that PC separately. Where you find these drivers varies by PC maker.
⏩ How to proceed
Given the above, you have a choice of two paths forward.

Install Windows 11 using the Windows 11 disk image (ISO) file. This is arguably the easiest and quickest way, and it’s described in the Upgrade chapter: Download the file from Microsoft, locate it in your Downloads folder, double-click it to mount the ISO as a virtual disk in your PC’s file system, and then run Setup.exe in the root of that virtual disk to start Windows Setup. Then, follow the instructions in Complete Windows Setup in the Upgrade chapter, being sure to choose “Nothing” when you reach the “Choose what to keep” screen in Windows Setup.

Install Windows 11 using USB-based installation media. This is the method I focus on in this chapter. It’s more versatile in that it works with Windows 11 on Arm as well as the more common x64-based versions of Windows 11. And if you use Rufus, you can customize Windows Setup to bypass some Microsoft-imposed limitations and blockers.
✅ Tip: Be sure to download the latest version of the Windows 11 disk image file and/or create new Windows 11 installation media even if you’ve done so in the past. Microsoft updates its disk images...