How to Install Windows 10 Lite on Older Computers

So many PC gamers these days are installing what they call “Windows 10 Lite” on their computers. Windows 10 Lite is custom build of Windows 10. It is essentially the same Windows 10 system as you get from the official Microsoft website, but some components have been removed from it. The reason why these components have been removed is because gamers think those components are not need to play games.

As such Windows 10 Lite does not have Cortana, Windows Defender or Windows Update. This makes it very fast to load and more system resources are available for playing games. But it also makes it highly vulnerable to attack from various malware as it has no antivirus pre-installed.

In my opinion, the only safe and good use of Windows 10 Lite is for testing it using Virtual Box or Qemu.

If you want to install Windows 10 Lite on your old PC then you can follow these steps:

  1. Download Windows 10 Lite from https://archive.org/details/win10pro1909.476lite. It is only 1.1 GB.
  2. Download Rufus from https://rufus.ie/en/ and use Rufus to create a bootable USB drive. If you do not want to use a USB drive, then you can also burn it on a blank DVD.Windows 10 Bootable USB Disk
  3. Boot using the newly created Windows 10 Lite bootable USB drive and proceed with the installation. The installation goes as usual for Windows 10.

While Windows 10 Lite is really fast, it poses some risks and problems too. For example, when installed on an Acer laptop, I could not use the FN function keys at all. These keys are necessary for working with WiFi or switching input devices. On the other hand when used with a desktop PC (Fujitsu), it worked as expected. The multimedia keyboard also seemed to work beautifully.

In conclusion, we can say that while Windows 10 Lite is really very fast, it might fail to work for some applications  as many of its components have been removed. From the security side, it is not recommended at all because all the necessary components such as Windows Update and Windows Defender have been removed. Furthermore, you will not get any official support from Microsoft.

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