I finally admit that bootable USB has saved my bacon more times than a CD ever did

For years I kept a stack of burned Windows install CDs in my van, thought USB drives were too easy to lose or corrupt. Last week I had to reinstall Windows 10 on a client's laptop in a cramped office in Tulsa and the optical drive was dead, so I grabbed a spare 8GB drive and used Rufus on my own machine. Has anyone else found a tool that makes bootable USBs faster than Rufus or is that pretty much the gold standard now?

2 comments

2 Comments

sam171mo ago

Have you ever tried the Windows Media Creation Tool? A buddy of mine swore by Rufus for years, but he grabbed a drive with the official tool last month and said it handled a finicky Dell laptop where Rufus kept throwing errors. Your mileage may vary, but he claimed it was hands down faster for that specific job.

tarag281mo ago

Oh man, @sam17 I feel you so hard on this! I had the exact same thing happen with a stubborn old HP laptop last year. Rufus worked fine for years on my main rig, but that one machine just refused to boot anything I made with it. I finally caved and used the Media Creation Tool out of desperation (I was about to throw the laptop out the window, honestly) and it worked on the first try. It's wild how picky some hardware can be about how the USB is set up. I definitely wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself. So yeah, your buddy isn't crazy, that tool saved my sanity too.