Create installation media for Windows

You can use installation media (a USB flash drive or DVD) to install a new copy of Windows, perform a clean installation, or reinstall Windows 10.

To create installation media, go to the software download website, where you’ll find step-by-step instructions. On that website, you can select a version of Windows and create your own installation media using either a USB flash drive or a DVD. To go directly to one of the versions, select one of these links:

Windows 10 (Then select Download tool now.)

Important: Back up your files before you install or reinstall Windows on your PC. Learn how for Windows 10 or for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

To create the installation media, here’s what you’ll need:

A PC with a reliable internet connection. The download time will vary, depending on your internet connection.

A USB flash drive or DVD. A blank USB flash drive with at least 8 GB of space, or a blank DVD (and DVD burner). We recommend using a blank USB or blank DVD because any content on it will be deleted. When burning a DVD from an ISO file, if you’re told the disc image file is too large, you’ll need to use dual layer (DL) DVD media.

A product key. Your 25-character product key (not required for digital licenses). For help finding it, go to Find your Windows product key.

After you’ve created the installation media, you can reset or reinstall Windows. To learn more, go to Recovery options in Windows 10.

Make for Windows

Make: GNU make utility to maintain groups of programs

Version

Description

Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program’s source files. Make gets its knowledge of how to build your program from a file called the makefile, which lists each of the non-source files and how to compute it from other files. When you write a program, you should write a makefile for it, so that it is possible to use Make to build and install the program.

Capabilities of Make

• Make enables the end user to build and install your package without knowing the details of how that is done — because these details are recorded in the makefile that you supply.
• Make figures out automatically which files it needs to update, based on which source files have changed. It also automatically determines the proper order for updating files, in case one non-source file depends on another non-source file. As a result, if you change a few source files and then run Make, it does not need to recompile all of your program. It updates only those non-source files that depend directly or indirectly on the source files that you changed.
• Make is not limited to any particular language. For each non-source file in the program, the makefile specifies the shell commands to compute it. These shell commands can run a compiler to produce an object file, the linker to produce an executable, ar to update a library, or TeX or Makeinfo to format documentation.
• Make is not limited to building a package. You can also use Make to control installing or deinstalling a package, generate tags tables for it, or anything else you want to do often enough to make it worth while writing down how to do it.

Homepage

Download

If you download the Setup program of the package, any requirements for running applications, such as dynamic link libraries (DLL’s) from the dependencies as listed below under Requirements, are already included. If you download the package as Zip files, then you must download and install the dependencies zip file yourself. Developer files (header files and libraries) from other packages are however not included; so if you wish to develop your own applications, you must separately install the required packages.

Description	Download	Size	Last change	Md5sum
• Complete package, except sources	Setup	3384653	25 November 2006	8ae51379d1f3eef8360df4e674f17d6d
• Sources	Setup	1252948	25 November 2006	b896c02e3d581040ba1ad65024bbf2cd
• Binaries	Zip	495645	25 November 2006	3521948bc27a31d1ade0dcb23be16d49
• Dependencies	Zip	708206	25 November 2006	d370415aa924fa023411c4099ef84563
• Documentation	Zip	2470575	25 November 2006	43a07e449d4bab3eb3f31821640ecab7
• Sources	Zip	2094753	25 November 2006	8bed4cf17c5206f8094f9c96779be663

You can also download the files from the GnuWin32 files page.

You can monitor new releases of the port of this package.

How to use GNU Make on Windows?

I installed MinGW and MSYS, added C:\MinGW\bin to PATH but I still can’t run Makefile on Windows’ cmd . I would like to run cmd.exe and there type, for example, make all but my cmd says that there is no such command.

What should I do? I don’t want to use MSYS shell, that’s not the point. Any ideas how to use GNU Make in Windows cmd as I can do it in Ubuntu? I’m not interested in Cygwin .

7 Answers 7

Here’s how I got it to work:

Then I am able to open a command prompt and type make:

Which means it’s working now!

I’m using GNU Make from the GnuWin32 project, see http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ but there haven’t been any updates for a while now, so I’m not sure on this project’s status.

Although this question is old, it is still asked by many who use MSYS2.

I started to use it this year to replace CygWin, and I’m getting pretty satisfied.

To install make , open the MSYS2 shell and type the following commands:

You can add the application folder to your path from a command prompt using:

setx PATH «%PATH%;c:\MinGW\bin»

Note that you will probably need to open a new command window for the modified path setting to go into effect.

As an alternative, if you just want to install make, you can use the chocolatey package manager to install gnu make by using

choco install make -y

This deals with any path issues that you might have.

user1594322 gave a correct answer but when I tried it I ran into admin/permission problems. I was able to copy ‘mingw32-make.exe’ and paste it, over-ruling/by-passing admin issues and then editing the copy to ‘make.exe’. On VirtualBox in a Win7 guest.

While make itself is available as a standalone executable ( gnuwin32.sourceforge.net package make ), using it in a proper development environment means using msys2.

Git 2.24 (Q4 2019) illustrates that:

test-tool run-command : learn to run (parts of) the testsuite

Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin

Git for Windows jumps through hoops to provide a development environment that allows to build Git and to run its test suite.

To that end, an entire MSYS2 system, including GNU make and GCC is offered as «the Git for Windows SDK».
It does come at a price: an initial download of said SDK weighs in with several hundreds of megabytes, and the unpacked SDK occupies

2GB of disk space.

A much more native development environment on Windows is Visual Studio. To help contributors use that environment, we already have a Makefile target vcxproj that generates a commit with project files (and other generated files), and Git for Windows’ vs/master branch is continuously re-generated using that target.

The idea is to allow building Git in Visual Studio, and to run individual tests using a Portable Git.

Create Your Own Windows 10 Custom Themes

In the Windows 10 Creators Update, you can now download Windows 10 Themes from the Windows Store. But in addition to those Microsoft-produced themes, you can also make your own Windows 10 custom themes using the Settings menu. Here is how you can create and use your own Windows 10 custom themes.

Opening the Themes Menu

1. Open “Settings” from the Start Menu.

2. Click “Personalization,” then click “Themes.”

3. This will open the themes menu which allows you to adjust your desktop background, choose theme colors, change your cursor and modify system sounds.

Change Desktop Background

1. Click the “Background” button which displays the name of your current wallpaper underneath.

2. Select the type of desktop background you want from the drop-down menu.

3. If you chose “Picture” from the drop-down menu, you can now select an image to appear as your background. The five most recent desktop backgrounds will appear as thumbnails below “Choose your picture.” You can also click the “Browse” button to select different images from your computer.

4. Finally, you can choose how the image should be displayed under “Choose a fit.”

• Fill: resizes the image (if necessary) to cover your entire background but does not change the proportions of the image
• Fit: fits the entire image on screen
• Stretch: changes the proportions of the image to cover your entire screen while displaying the whole image. This can seriously distort an image.
• Tile: repeats the image as many times as necessary to cover the whole desktop
• Center: centers the image on the screen without resizing or adjusting
• Span: If you have more than one monitor, stretches the desktop background to cover all your displays without repeating. Otherwise it’s the same as fill.

5. If you chose solid color, select the color from the palette or click “Custom color” to select a different color.

6. If you chose slideshow, select the folder to use as a source for your images. You can then select how often the image should be changed, from one minute to one day, and choose whether to shuffle the images.

Change Theme Colors

Colors refers to the accent color that shows up in certain places in the UI. The accent color will affect the background of Start Menu icons, the indicator for the Taskbar, the color of selected system menus and a few more things here and there.

1. Click the “Colors” button.

2. Choose a color from the palette or click “Custom color” to select a different color.

3. You can also tick “Automatically pick an accent color from my background,” which will analyze your current background image and change the theme color based on that. If you have a slideshow selected, it will not automatically update the color each time the background changes.

4. Below the color selection, you have the option to turn on some extra effects.

• Transparency effects: toggles system-wide transparency options
• Show accent color: enables the color you just selected on a variety of additional UI elements
• Default app mode: uses either a white or black background for system apps like Settings.

Change Cursor

1. Click the “Mouse cursor” button.

2. Click the drop-down menu under “Scheme” to select a themed set of system cursors.

3. If you’ve downloaded or created a set of .ani files to use as cursor replacements, you can click “Browse…” to open a folder with cursor replacements.

4. If you mess things up, return to the default with the “Use Default” button.

5. Click “OK” when you’re done.

Change System Sounds

1. Click the “Sounds” button.

2. Under “Sound Scheme” you can select a themed set of sounds to use for your system.

3. You can also modify or disable individual types of audio events. Click on an event under “Program Events” to select it.

4. Once you’ve selected an event, you can use the drop-down under “Sounds” to change the sound for that event. Select “(None)” if you want to disable sound for that event type.

5. To hear what a file sounds like, select it from the drop-down and click the “Test” button.

6. If you have custom .wav files you want to use as system sounds, click the “Browse” button to load them.

7. Click “OK” when you’re done.

Conclusion: Saving Your Theme

Each part of your theme will apply automatically as you make changes. To save the entire theme as a package, click the “Save Theme” button under the main Theme menu.

Give your Theme a name, then click “Save.”

Now that you have created your own custom theme, you can export it and use it on any of your Windows 10 machines.

Alexander Fox is a tech and science writer based in Philadelphia, PA with one cat, three Macs and more USB cables than he could ever use.