By Zak Killian
Publication Date: 2026-03-14 13:45:00
If your Windows install is feeling creaky and you want to freshen up, or if you don’t have Windows at all, the fastest way to fix things up is to simply do a clean install. Back up your important stuff to a NAS, a second PC, external storage, or even a cloud service, and then wipe the whole system disk and start fresh. It’s amazing how many system issues and quirky problems you can fix this way; I do it about once every 3 months no matter what. The process is a little different these days than it used to be. If you haven’t done it in a while, here’s a quick guide.
To install Windows 11 on a PC, you have a few options. If you already have a Windows install on that system, you can do a Cloud Download reinstall from the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE). If the machine’s drives are blank, or you simply want to do it the old-fashioned way, the two options both require external storage: you can write the Windows install files to an external device using Microsoft’s own…
