Disclaimer: I am by no mean a professional. I am just doing this for fun and enjoy learning along the way (I probably still don’t know anything 🤣). These are not meant as a guide and should not be treated as such. What I am showing you here is what I did, and it worked for me and my situation but might not apply to you. Your result could be very different from mine. Heck, I could be doing or saying something entirely wrong since I’m still considering myself a newbie (Hence the name of my site “noob to networking” 😉). Please don’t take a random person’s words on the internet too seriously, and again, ALWAYS and I mean always do your own research (Well, take this one seriously, though).

Well, hello there. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrated it, and a typical sunny day for everyone else. Yes, I’m writing this on Thanksgiving day. Why? You ask. Well, you see, because I have been procrastinated the heck out of everything and today is one day that I told myself, maybe spending an hour or two finishing this up won’t hurt too much (Of course, I have no doubt that I would be wrong and this takes a lot longer than expected just like everything I estimated in life 🥲). With that said, I will show you how I installed Window 11 on Dusti. For those who are asking who or what the heck is Dusti? Do you see that little white PC in the picture above? Yes, that is Dusti. Dusti is the name I gave my “Budget” PC in the previous post of the How I series, where I talked about building my PC. You can find the post HERE.

With that out of the way, let us get back to the main topic. After I finished building Dusti, the next step was to install the operating system (or OS for short) on it as the standard practice. I mean, you can’t really do much with a computer that doesn’t have an operating system installed right? So yes, in general, most people included installing the OS as one of the steps in the building PC process, and they are right. However, I was pretty tired after assembling the hardware, so I fell back to my lazy mode and let Dusti do what it does best, collecting dust for another week or two before I got off my lazy butt and worked on it. Two weeks have passed and today is the day where Dusti finally has the OS installed and officially become a full-fledged computer that you can actually do something with. Hurray!🥳 And my OS of choice is, of course, Windows. Sorry to all the Linux users out there, I’m just a filthy peasant when it comes to computers, and with my limited knowledge of Linux, it would be more of a pain to install Linux on Dusti, and you know I always picked the path of least resistance😜 . Not to mention Windows really is the most popular OS, and most of the programs are just worked without much configuration for an average user (AKA me). So yeah, I’m not going to apologize for saying you can’t go wrong with Windows (until something goes wrong, of course).

Alright, so Windows is the OS of choice then. Now, the real question would be, do I want to go with the stable and good Windows 10? Or live life dangerously on the edge and go with the latest Windows 11? And you know me, I have been too stable for so long, so of course, I will go with the brand new shiny Windows 11 with its fancy new UI and looks (maybe with a couple of issues, or some crashed). Some of my friends were early adopters of Windows 11. One in particular(I called him Kiwi) mentioned they experienced a couple of crashes and some instability with the OS and suggested sticking with Windows 10 at least for a couple of months until Microsoft rolled out more fixes and ironed out some bugs. But well, what is the fun in that? I love shiny new things, and this is as close to a shiny thing as it gets. Not to mention, I am quite a sucker for clean user interface (or UI for short), and I kind of dig windows 11 esthetic. Therefore I jumped to it and installed Windows 11 on Dusti. Will this decision come back and bite me? Very likely, but at least I have something new shiny thing to play with. Not to mention I did upgrade to Windows 11 Home from Windows 10 on my laptop for a few weeks now, and I have not run into any issues…yet.

To install Windows or any OS for that matter, the process is very similar. First, you need to obtain the image containing the OS, then install that into your storage drive and point to that to say, “hey computer, next time when you boot up, just boot into this program that I conveniently saved on this drive”. In case you haven’t realized by now, the Operating system is just another program just like those that you use every day except its function were to be the middle man and manage other programs, telling the CPU where to put its brainpower(resources would be the technical term) to good use. The movie Inception talked about dreams within a dream; then this is programs within a program or “programs-ceptions” 😜. Also, programs are just a set of instructions to tell your computer what to do (mostly doing math and calculation…you know the typical computing tasks). It is not that complicated to put the matter into perspective (of course, it is complicated if you do go into the detail) but for the most part that is pretty much how it is.

Okay, so here is the list of what you need to have to be able to perform this super-duper complex task of installing the OS to your PC:

1. A USB flash drive or any media storage for that matter. The typical size for Windows is around 4-5 GB (pronounced Gi-ga-bite), so you probably want some USB flash drive with that much storage. Generally, they are pretty cheap nowadays, and you can find one for under $10, ranging from 8 GB to 128 GB. I went with the 16GB since I do have a couple of USB flash drives laying around.
2. The OS. We should be able to find the OS image on the internet from the official website (making sure you don’t download it from some shady website since who knows if they have done something to it). Microsoft’s website provided us with a couple of options to get the OS, so we shouldn’t have any issues. There are a couple of OS that is tricky (not impossible) to get our hand on, such as macOS and some other licensed OS, but well, they aren’t meant to be installed without the owner’s permission for a reason, but I just mentioned here for your information.
3. Some common computer sense, yea, I mean it should be a pretty straightforward process. As long as you can read and have some reason, you should figure it out. Of course, if it is too much work, there should be many guides out there to walk you step by step on how to do it, so just google it and pick the winner.
4. If you don’t have number 3, it is okay too. You just need the ability to follow instructions and hope it works out for you. Or you can also throw money at the problem and ask someone to do it for you. That is also a viable option.
5. I forgot to mention that you also need a working computer to start this process. If it were your first ever PC and you have no other working computer, you might want to call a friend for help or start making friends. If you aren’t tech-savvy, then it is a good idea to have one friend who knows the way around and can help you out in the time of need, or you can take a matter into your own hand and becomes your own tech support.

Let start, shall we? First, we need to find the Operating system on the working computer. For Windows 10 and 11, you can find it from a quick google search, and it should lead you to this official Microsoft page. But if you are too lazy to search it up yourself (like me), then here is the link:

https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/windows11

Now that we have our bootable Flash drive ready, let’s move on to Dusti. We can plug the bootable drive into any USB slots on Dusti and press the power button. It should boot into Windows 11 on the Flash drive automatically since most modern motherboard does have the feature of auto-detect if they have any boot drive that they can use. If no bootloader is found, it will boot into the system Bios. By chance, Suppose you have multiple OS and multiple bootloaders (Bootloader means this is the launch sequence to tell the PC to use this operating system). In that case, you need to go into the Bios and set the boot priority order so that if the first boot is not found, it will go down the list. For example, if you have Windows 10 installed on drive 1, Linux on drive 2, and Windows 11 on the flash drive. Usually, when you press the power button to turn on the PC, the boot order would be: drive 1, drive 2, USB (unless you specifically go into the setting to change the boot order). Of course, you can also have options of constantly smashing the F12 key at the start-up to go into the boot menu where you get to choose which boot you want to boot from, but that sounded too much effort if you’re going to do that every time. Ahem, sorry I got sidetracked, but yes plug the USB drive in, turn on the PC, and this is what you should see.

Wait, you expect this is a guide, so everything should work? Oh, how naive of you. I never said this is a guide, and it never meant to be, so yeah. However, I can enlighten you about why these errors occur, and I’m sure many of you will run into this. Windows 11 gives “this PC does not meet the requirement” error due to one of the few requirements that Windows 11 requires that was not needed in previous Windows, and that is TPM and secure boot.
What is TPM, you ask? Well, long story short, TPM stands for Trusted Platform Module. This is a chip that is in charge of securing the hardware with integrated cryptographic keys. Does this make no sense to you? Don’t worry since you aren’t alone. This is pretty much just an additional safety measure to prevent the computer from getting exploited at the hardware level with a chip that verifies that everything is working properly and has not been tampered with. Most modern CPUs are equipped with this, though they aren’t enabled by default.
Secure boot is a preventive measure to ensure that on the software side. Even if the computer was compromised by malware (the program that has malicious intents and can do bad things to your computers, so maybe refrain from visiting shady websites and some…ahem… corn websites 😏) Secure boot will stop the malware from changing some main files components of the OS such as boot loader so your computer will still be able to boot and functions.

Windows 11 is pretty much just ask what the available options for security are and say, “great! I want all of that, and I will also make sure whoever doesn’t have it won’t be able to join the cool kid club 😎”. So yeah, we need to enable those options on the bios to be able to install windows 11 on Dusti.

I have to backtrack and get into the Bios on Dusti. There are a couple of ways to go about it, I can just restart Dusti and smash the DEL key to get into the Bios at the start-up screen, or I can just restart and remove the USB drive since when Dusti couldn’t find the USB boot drive, it will atomically boot into the Bios. So do whichever way as long as you are in the Bios, then you are good.

Okay, so after the changes made to the Bios to enable TPM and secure boot. Everything “Should” work right? Let get back to the Windows installer.

So yea, I derped out, I took a screenshot for the Windows 11 prompt, and I thought I had all my screenshots uploaded. I deleted them from my PC, and now I realize I do not have those screenshots. Oops! 🤭. Oh well, the prompt is very straightforward, and you should be able to do it without me telling you how. Follow the instruction to set up Windows 11, and voila! Dusti is now rocking Windows 11 operating system. The latest and maybe not the most excellent Windows, but it is what it is. I need to do a couple of things after the initial install of Windows 11.

1. Go to setting, Windows update, and update the PC to the latest version of Windows along with all the missing drivers and security patches.
2. I download some software to stress test Dusti, like Prime 95 to test the CPU, Memtest to test the memory, and Heaven Benchmark to test graphic capability… The main point is to see if Dusti crashed or had any issue when put under stress (just like humans 😜 though humans sometimes perform better under pressure, that is not the point I’m trying to make here)
3. Finally, I downloaded some games, the only game I currently play and am curious to see if it performs well: Final Fantasy XIV. That and Genshin Impact, too, but we don’t talk about that as I’m not playing it.

Oh, and don’t forget your Windows License keys when you get it 😅. It will fully activate your Windows and unlock all the features (I hope). Also, I opted out of the online account and used a local account instead since I prefer not to share more of the information that I already have. Still, you might want to do that if you are into Microsoft’s ecosystems, and it makes life easier for you. Just know security and conveniences are pretty far apart in the spectrum of things.
Pheww😮‍💨, that was surprising a lot of writing for just a simple process such as installing Windows. I hope you are enjoying the read. Please have a good laugh at my derpy mistake. It’s all good, though; we learn best from making mistakes after all. If you have any questions, you can put them in the comment section(though I limited the ability the post comments to registered members only to prevent spam). Or you can contact me directly using the contact form. It should be Monday when this post is live, so wish you have a great week! Until next time.

-Laz