Set Up Your Software

You’ve made it. You’ve got a brand new rig, and you’re ready to kick some serious ass in those 1080p games. But how do you get there? How do you install an operating system on your new machine? You haven’t installed an optical disc drive in your chassis, and you don’t seem to have one laying around either, so where do you go from here? No need to worry—we’ve got your back. The last time we used one of those DVD readers was way back in 2016, and even then that was only to see whether the coverdisc of our friends over on the Linux titles would read properly. Spoiler: It did, then they trashed our DVD drive. Typical, right?

But enough waffle. You’re here to install your OS of choice. For us, that’s Windows 10. You could game on Linux, if you want, but because this is PC PowerPlay, not PC Game Releases Two Years Later, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), we’re stuck with Microsoft.

BOOTABLE MEDIA STICK

First thing you need to do is grab an 8GB USB stick, preferably 3.0, if you’ve got one. and hit the “Download tool now” button. This gives you an EXE file that you can then use to download and create a bootable USB stick. On MacOS or any Linux distro, you’re given an ISO instead of this, so you have to use a third-party program, such as Etcher, to mount the ISO on the USB stick.