How to Install Windows 11 "23H2" from Start to Finish + Tips & Tricks [2024]

what's going on everyone today I'm going to show you how to install the latest version of Windows 11 which is Windows 11 build 23 H2 AKA fall 2023 build this build just came out October 31st of 2023 the new Big build updates happen once a year for Windows 11 love it or hate it Windows 11 is the current version of Windows which is still receiving feature updates Windows 10 is still receiving security updates but no new Fe features are rolling out as it will be considered end of life with no updates at all starting October of 2024 so the main purpose of this video is going to be to install Windows 1123 H2 however if you have an older version of Windows 11 on your machine and you just want to force upgrade it to the latest and greatest version then we can go over that real quick here so first off let's just show how to determine which build of Windows 11 you already have and I'm showing this off on a Windows 10 machine however it's the same exact steps that you would do on a Windows 11 machine so if you go down to the start icon in the bottom here go ahead and just type in about then let's click on about your PC and then version right here under Windows specifications is going to show what your current version is and one thing to note is the installed on date is kind of nonsense as this changes periodically with updates it's not the ual date that the computer's OS was actually installed on so now that you can see which version you are on then you can decide if you actually need to make the jump or not or if you already have it so let me go ahead and close this so there's a few ways that you'll be able to make the jump to the latest and greatest version of Windows 1123 H2 one would be to go to start just type in Windows updates you can do check for updates and then you can force it here and you can give it a second and it may reveal that there is a new version of Windows 11 available of course it would look a little bit different where the check for updates would be over on the right hand side here but the same exact thing would happen the big thing with 23 H2 just like all other build updates is that Microsoft does a slow release of them so even if it says that it is not available then there are other methods of forcing the update and so if we close out a Windows update here so I'll have a link for everything that I show web- based in the description below however the main area that will be driving off of here is going to be the Windows media creation website here so they have a Windows 10 version and they also have the windows 11 version so of course this is the windows 11 version and so one way to update to the latest and graced version of Windows 11 is to go ahead and use the windows 11 installation assistant and if you're on a Windows 10 machine you can also use this to do a direct in place upgrade and so if we go ahead and download this and then we'll go up to the download section here and I'll pop this open and we can go ahead and kick this off and of course you will have to be an administrator of the machine in order to run any of this and then it would pop up with the usual user agreement stuff and you could click accept and install and then it's going to start the download process and then it would start the install process that is of course if your machine meets the minimum requirements of Windows 11 so that's just to show you that it does take a little bit of time so just be patient however I do recommend that if you are doing an inplace upgrade of from Windows 10 to 11 that the best method would be to do a clean install so that there are no orphan files and stuff like that generally the machine will act faster too with a clean install so I'm going to go ahead and cancel this and we'll cancel out of that so for the sake of this video I am going to show the bottom ption portions here of this website so if we scroll down we have two options here one is that we can actually use the Windows media creation tool to create a bootable drive and then there is also the other option of just downloading the iso and utilizing another application to go ahead and create a bootable media device so you could use something like Rufus or something of that sort once you've downloaded the ISO file here for the sake of this video I am going to use the windows 11 installation media here and then we are going to click on download now so of course one of the big things that we will need is you will need a USB thumb drive to be plugged in and if we actually click on here it'll State what the requirements are and if we scroll down a little bit so under the USB flash drive it mentions that you need at least an 8 gab Drive in order to actually create the bootable media from it and I will have a recommended thumb drive Linked In the description below if you don't have any on hand so we'll scroll down here and then let's go ahead and click on download now then I am going to hunt this down we'll fire this up yes and what I like to do is close out of everything that you have open so that it's just the windows 11 setup tool here this is your user agreement just go ahead and accept that give it some more time of getting a few things ready I usually leave the default here to keep this checked is use the recommended option for this PC and this is basically setting the language and the addition of Windows 11 we'll click next we are going down the USB flash drive route and of course once again it says it needs to be at least 8 GB in size so we'll hit next and of course if you have not already plugged in your USB thumb drive go ahead and do so and then you can click refresh Drive list and then it should hopefully see it for you here in this case it does see it as Drive e and the thumb drive is called Data we'll hit next and now it's just going to say getting a few things ready and then now we just give it some time and it's going to work its magic here so I'll let this progress through and when this is done we will continue on and of course the speed of this can be very dependent on a number of things it could be your internet connection or it could be the speed of your thumb drive and of course the speed of the computer itself so just be patient during all this it could take some time all right so if all goes well and you should see this page here it says your USB flash drive is ready if it errors at any point here I would just recommend rebooting your machine and starting from scratch again initiating the media creation setup tool and also just make sure that your USB thumb drive is plugged in tightly anyhow at this point we can click finish and that's going to say taking a few minutes that could pop up on the screen for a while or could disappear pretty fast the next thing I want to go over is of course the drivers aka the software that's going to be the middleman between your operating system and your hardware and so you could potentially install Windows 11 with no drivers and it will set generic drivers or the base drivers that Windows has for your Hardware however results May Vary for performance the big thing that I'd recommend doing is going to your computer's vendor website if it's one that was purchased then you can just look up the model on the machine itself and then just do a Google search for that or if it's a machine that you built then generally you probably understand the hardware that is in your machine so you would want to look up your motherboard manufacturer and model download the drivers that you need for that and your graphics card and any other things that you may have added to your machine you would download the drivers for this is a Lenovo desktop that was purchased pre-built and so in my case I could for just an example I could open up my web browser and then I could just go into the URL L section and I can type in lenovo.com and like I said this is just an example I'm just going to go to support PC view PC support and then I can type in the model that I have this is an m720 q and then I can just go to downloads manual update and then I can choose from the list of drivers that are available here it also has the filter to select which operating system I have to further filter things out here to make it easier and then you can just download what you need here to kind of show you what I do I'll go into my driver's folder here that I've already pre-downloaded everything and I like to first off create the folders ahead of time and so I also set a number and that's kind of the priority that I use to install all these drivers and so I always start off with the chipset very first number two is the Intel management engine which is going to be dependent on if your device actually has it or not with this being more of a business class computer it has the Intel management engine Drive so that's why I have this here there's also a storage driver the Nick AKA network interface card AKA your ethernet if you had Wireless then I'd probably put Wireless as number five instead of graphics and then you'd put your wireless driver in and so for me this doesn't have wireless so I have number five as being for the graphics AKA GPU or video card and then finally six is going to be my audio so the key thing that I really like to do is download those drivers before you do anything because otherwise it could be a little more difficult to try to do things after the fact especially if it's your only machine and you don't have wireless or network drivers at all to actually be able to reach out to the internet and download those drivers after the fact so I'm just going to go ahead and pop open this PC here I'm going to pop open the thumb drive and I'm just going to stash by copying and pasting this folder right onto the thumb drive here and anything that pops up I'm just going to do to do this for all current and yes of course once again depending on the size of the files speed of your USB thumb drive and the USB interface that you have it plugged into everything is going to vary for Speed all right with that copied over let's close out of this the next big thing is going to be getting your computer to actually boot off of the USB thumb drive unfortunately all machines are different and you do have a few options one is that you can attempt to use Windows to boot into the recovery mode which would allow you to select the USB thumb drive to boot from and so let me show you how to do that now so if we go to start settings update and security recovery on the left and you can choose Advanced startup here and I'll go through the steps of just doing this just to show it so we'll do restart now of course make sure to keep your USB thumb drive plugged in before you do this and it's going to come up with this and so it's going to show use a device use a USB drive network connection or Windows recovery DVD so if we click this then I can just select generic USB device and then just give it some time as it has to read from the thumb drive and so this was one method to get into this I'm going to show the alternative method which is sometimes a little more difficult or sometimes a little bit easier if this first method fails so the second what I'd consider sometimes more difficult method is that every manufacturer for the machine is different as far as the boot order key might be on the machine some machines it could be the F2 key that you have to mash at the startup screen so in my case Lenovo splash screen that pops up and you've got to mash the the specific key that you want in order to get into the boot order or boot device so it could be F2 could be F6 could be f8 could be F9 F10 F12 delete key if you have a Microsoft Surface it may involve having to hold the power button and the volume down or volume up button at the same exact time for it to boot into the boot device setting so for mine being a Lenovo machine it's F12 so if I go and restart my machine and then as soon as I see the manufacturer splash screen here I will start mashing the F12 key and just keep mashing it you may even get error beeps from your computer as it's getting angry thinking that there's a stuck key and in my case I will use the down arrow on my keyboard to move down to the USB hard disk drive and then the generic USB device here and I'll just hit enter and just be patient as it has to read from the thumb drive which is of course drastically slower than a hard drive is to pull up the installation media all right we are at the beginning section here of the Windows setup and so generally a lot of this is going to be autop populated if you kept that that box check that said use the recommended uh installation of window Windows 11 however one thing I do want to note here and this is completely optional but there's a few tricks that I'm going to show during the entire install setup one of these tricks is at this screen here to effectively debloat Windows 11 so that the start menu doesn't have all that garbage in it like Tik Tock and clipchamp and all that stuff which of course can be put on after the fact but if you don't want all this stuff cluttering up your start menu this is going to be your kind of hidden trick here it's under time and currency format it's set to English United States which is where I am however if I click this and I do English world and then I can keep the keyboard as is this here so all those apps that are on the start menu are dependent on where you are in the world and of course different countries have different laws and all that good stuff into how things can be uh placed on your machine so this here effectively makes it so that it will just say okay just to be safe I'm not going to put any of that stuff on the machine so let's hit next here install now give it a moment as setup is starting and then we accept the user agreement and hit next for this section here I am going to do custom install Windows only Advanced let's click this however one thing to note is that you can technically do an in place upgrade of Windows 11 using this as well however like I said I strongly recommend if you're doing an upgrade from Windows 10 to 11 my recommendation is to just do a clean install don't do an in place upgrade so just back up your data all that good stuff before you even hit this point so let's select the custom install Windows only and then it's going to show your drives and also the partitions of the drives and so I only have one drive in this machine which is a 500 gig SSD drive and so the first drive always shows up as Drive zero and then if you had another drive then you'd see drive 1 2 3 and so on so the first thing we need to do is we need to clean this all up so so that everything will be nice and sparkly clean for the new OS install here so I'm going to go right down the line and I'm going to select all these partitions and of course before I hit okay here just this is kind of a final point if there is any data on your machine make sure you backed it up before we even start on this if you didn't back it up you can hit cancel here you can click the X it's going to say are you sure you want to quit you can hit yes and then just rinse and repeat from the point in the video of me getting into the windows 11 installation portion so I'm just going to hit no for this but we will go through basically warning us that the data is going to be deleted in this partition we can hit okay and you'll see a section shows up as unallocated space and I'm just going to keep going down the partition numbers here deleting these now everything is in one Big Blob of unallocated space that looks fine and now we can select new and I can apply it of course it's a 500 100 Gig drive but with how formatting and all that good stuff works it it has a little bit of a sacrifice and all the marketing stuff but anyhow we'll hit apply hit okay and now it's going to just build the partitions it needs here and then we will select next another thing is you could also skip the format portion and just hit next but I just want to show that it is going to recreate some partitions here so we'll just hit next and now you just be patient and let it crunch along and the Machine May reboot a few times as it goes through the whole installation process and we're just getting ready this could take some time as it's effectively trying to set up a whole bunch of stuff including base drivers and we'll just give it some time to keep working its magic here if you get this something went wrong section here this could be because we set the English Global region and so we can skip this for right now however if you didn't see that then you would be at this section right here so this gives you an option to change up your keyboard layout my my case I'm going to leave this as is so hit yes do I want to add a second keyboard layout you can do add layout if you want to I'm just going to skip this it's going to do checking for updates and then your computer May restart and then give it some time for it to resolve your network sometimes I found it can hang on the screen for a while and just be patient sometimes unfortunately Microsoft May block you from continuing on with the installation of Windows 11 if it just cannot find the network at all Sometimes the best thing to do is just to plug in a generic us be Nick if you run into that issue so anyhow we'll just hit continue here or next and it'll give you the option to name your machine or you can skip it for now and it will give you a generic name however this is really the best opportunity to name it I'm just going to name this Hubert because why not we'll hit next just going to go through some more setup processes here and then let's hit next again for this screen here the screen goes black it's probably because the graphic driver was installing I found sometimes what you have to do is is try to get your mouse cursor over into the right hand area here just to click on one of these options just kind of keep clicking around should bring the option back into view it's just a weird Quirk I've seen anyhow as far as your choice here for the most part people will be setting it up as personal use however if you are on a domain then you would select this option I believe because I'm installing Windows 11 Pro I believe for the home edition it doesn't even give this option here because home does not allow you to set it up on a domain so anyhow for today's purposes we are going to set up for personal use and we will hit next and then it's going to essentially force you to sign into a Microsoft account here and I'm going to show another little trick here so if you do not want to sign in with a Microsoft account and have everything on the machine kind of bound to the account let me show you this little trick here type in Noth than you.com and and hit next enter just anything for a password it can just be gibberish hit sign in it's going to say oops something went wrong and then it's going to force us to create a local account on this machine so I will just set up as user hit next and of course you still have the option that you could go back and set up to an online Microsoft account but I just want to show this little trick here for the purpose of this video I will not set a password however I strongly recommend you do we'll hit next and then it's going to give you the option of privacy settings here I usually keep location on of course all this is optional you could turn it all off or just leave it all on however location I'm going to leave on find my device I'll turn off scroll down here diagnostic data set to only required only inking and typing no tailored experiences no advertising ID no make sure we've got it all so like I said this is all optional here you can pick and choose whatever you want here this is kind of my default I'll hit accept be patient as it checks for for updates and just be patient as it configures your profile here so immediately as it starts up here the start menu will be right in our face and one thing to note is that it is nice and clean without all the bloat on it like I said with Tik Tok and Netflix and all that good stuff one thing to mention about all those is even if the shortcuts are here the applications themselves aren't actually installed you would have to click on it first for it to actually initiate a download and install of the app so it more or less just debloats it as as far as just not having all that clutter there so the first thing I'm going to do is let's click on the desktop here to get rid of the start menu I'm just going to fine-tune a few things here just to make this easier to see and of course all this is complety optional but since I'm pretty old school as far as my windows environments go I want things to look as Windows 10 based as I can so let's click on the taskbar down here right click on it click on taskbar settings first thing I'm going to do like I said this is all optional but I'm going to get get rid of the search box task view I don't want widgets turn off chat turn off next we will scroll down on taskbar behaviors let's click on this scroll down again taskbar alignment I'm going to set it to the old school leftand corner now it's down here you can keep it as Center if you really wanted to and then we can close out of this for right now the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust my display resolution generally it automatically adjusts it on your machine however since since I'm using a special Pi KVM device to actually show this all off it can't determine what the native resolution is supposed to be so I'm going to force it so I'm just going to right click here on the desktop background display settings maximize this and I'm going to change this to 1920 by 1080 which is what the setting should be keep changes that looks a lot better now another thing I'm going to do real quick is just get into personalization I'm just going to set it to this here you can of course go through and select your background your colors all that good stuff to set it so it's like a dark theme and things like that but this is an easier way just to do that and then you can kind of change things after the fact and fine-tune them how you like it another thing we need to do is if you did the optional step of changing it to English Global we want to set it to the proper local of where this machine is otherwise weird things can happen and you may experience errors so if we go over on the left hand side and select time and language language and region and then for region country or region let's change this to the country that you're in I'm just going to select United States and now we can close out of this one thing I'm going to do real quick is I am going to click on the start menu and I'm going to pin Edge to the taskbar and I'm also going to pin file explorer to the taskbar these may or may not already be on your task bar bar if you didn't select the optional region local that we adjusted during the install set up the other thing I'm going to do I'm just going to get rid of the Xbox app there so things will be nice and clean here next I am going to click on file explorer and we're going to hunt down the thumb drive so I'm going to click on this PC or I could have clicked the thumb drive here but I just want to show it off here so here is the thumb drive let's pop this open and let's go ahead and copy the drivers to the desktop I'm just going toand that out to show all the magic happening here and next let's go ahead and install all the drivers that your machine needs so I'm just going to pop up in the folder here and I'm just going to go through the step of just installing one of the drivers just so that you can see what it's supposed to kind of look like kick off the chipset driver and the contents for the executable here yes for this and I accept next I'm just going to select install for that that's fine and install it's got a little another setup window here we'll just install for that and that is finished so I'll hit finish and finish again so that driver is now ready to go I'm not going to go through and show all these but at the moment I'm going to install all of them and then when once all the drivers are installed we'll come back and we'll continue on with the setup processes here if at any point during the driver installation process that you did not get the popup asking to reboot at all I would recommend just rebooting your computer just before we begin with the next steps here so next let's do a little more fine-tuning here of the computer these are of course once again all optional but I want to show them off here so if we go down into the bottom right here you're going to have a few options here first thing is that Microsoft teams automatically starts and the way that we can actually turn that off as being one less application to start with the machine is if we right click on the taskbar go to task manager and then over here you'll have your startup apps and then here I'll just maximize this and in here we can disable applications that are automatically queued to either fire up or not fire up during the startup process and so this can decrease the startup time of your machine and it can also just decrease all the stuff that's running in the background for eating up battery life and CPU Cycles so what I like to do is for Microsoft Edge I actually like to disable it and one drive disable as well like I said this is all optional but this is kind of what I like to disable and then also Microsoft teams let's disable that as well and we can close out of that we'll go back into the system tray here teams is still running but that will not be showing up the next time it reboots and the same goes for one drive let's click on the Windows security Shield here has the exclamation so of course it's asking us to sign into the Microsoft account and so this is another opportunity that if you didn't sign in but you want to sign in you can click here we'll hit dismiss for this set up one drive this would automatically usually resolve if we signed into the account here you can also just click on setup one drive and continue with that process which effectively makes it that you have to sign in with your Microsoft account anyhow so we'll just hit dismiss for this and we can close out of that and now the shield down here should be happy with the green check so that's fine next the big thing is going to be patching Windows 11 so that it has bug fixes and security fixes so let's go to start settings if you have the popup that says windows isn't activated we can go ahead and activate that now then we can click on troubleshoot if it gives us an error here which case it is now happy and so let's go to Windows update the first thing I like to do before I do this and once again all this is optional for one if you want to stay up to date with the absolute latest available updates of features and all that good stuff we can toggle this on the other thing we can do is we can go to Advanced options let's click on this I recommend selecting this to receive updates for other Microsoft products get me up to date is really nice and the fact that if you need to walk away or at least patching the machine on the very first attempt just to make sure that it reboots if you need to walk away you can toggle this download updates over metered connections I like to toggle this on even if I don't have a metered connection I just want to make sure that I am getting my updates you can also make it so that it notifies me when a restart is required to finish updating and I like to turn that on once again this is all optional but we'll turn these all on for the sake of this video let's go back top left and then let's do check for updates the speed of checking for updates is completely dependent on your network speed and your hardware and of course this is also the very first time we are checking for updates so it's going to take longer as it needs to do its check and balances into what updates we have and which ones we don't have so we'll let it download and crunch here one thing to note is sometimes you'll see where the restart now shows up but it's actually actively installing if you hit restart now it should continue installing this but I'm pretty old school and I like to make sure that this stuff is actually done before I hit the restart so I'll just leave this B here and I'll just continue to make sure that everything that says pending install is flipped to hopefully pending restart at some point if you didn't click click on the restart now then the machine should have started to restart on its own if you had all the options checked that we had set and then we just wait patiently as it crunches along here all right so just a few things now that the Windows updates are complete just want to show you some quick ways of keeping the machine nice and fresh besides just making sure that your Windows updates are kept up to date all right so one other area that a lot of people I think kind of skip over is disc cleanup and this is just a tool that is built into window those if you've never used it before and this is a great way to every month or every two months or so just to go ahead and run through the processes of cleaning up junk that builds up on the machine and so we go down to start type in disk and then here's dis clean up here one thing I actually like to do is open file location and then right click on it show more options create shortcut it's going to say can't do it here but that's fine we'll hit yes and it will toss it right on the desktop for us the other thing is when we go to initiate it the key thing is to run it as an administrator otherwise it won't find everything even if you are an administrator on the machine running it as administrator is the key so I'll just left click just to highlight once we'll right click on it hit run as administrator and then I'll just check everything in here and then with everything checked you can see the amount of data that you'll gain here we'll just hit okay and delete files and then just let it Crunch and it could take some time anyhow that's all you need to do to install Windows 1123 H2 I hope you found this video to be useful if you did please like it and make sure to subscribe to my channel to see all my new stuff as it releases I would greatly appreciate it I also invite you to explore my Channel's other videos if you have not done so already lots of interesting project videos and many more to come anyhow until next time take it easy

Channel: Digital Scriptorium

Views: 3,090

Keywords: Windows, Windows 11, 11, Microsoft, 23H2

Id: OxXkujgljEA

Length: 29min 46sec (1786 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023