Having bootable media ready can be a real lifesaver when you need to do a clean installation of Windows. Thankfully, it's easy to set that up. There are two main ways to create bootable media for a ...

This FAQ will show you how to create a bootable USB drive to install Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows 8, and Windows 10. This sort of drive is especially useful for mini laptops that don't come with ...

I think the reason we haven't heard many complaints about the doing away of physical media is exactly this. As long as power users can make their own offline media, there's nothing to complain about.

Update: Before you try all of this, you may want to try using WinToFlash, a utility designed to create a bootable Windows flash drive for Windows XP/Vista/7/Server. If this works for you, you can skip ...

Taking another approach, several of the distributions use "hybrid" ISO images, which can be copied directly to a USB stick (with dd or equivalents) to create a bootable USB stick - Fedora, openSuSE ...