The Windows 11 media creation tool is used to create a bootable USB drive or DVD with the installation files for the OS. You typically turn to this tool to run a clean install or reinstall of Windows 11 on a new or existing computer. It's an ideal way to upgrade any Windows 10 PC to the latest supported version of Windows, not just your current PC.

There are a lot of people looking to upgrade to Windows 11 right now… and apparently a lot of them are having trouble doing so. Because one of the most popular methods for moving from Windows 10 to the new operating system—Microsoft’s official Media Creation Tool—has a debilitating bug in its latest release.

Microsoft has released Windows 11 KB5066835 and KB5066793 cumulative updates for versions 25H2/24H2 and 23H2 to fix security vulnerabilities and issues.

If a Windows upgrade has ever gone sideways on you, you know how vague and unhelpful the error messages can be. Here are my go-to troubleshooting tricks when that happens.

Microsoft will end support for Windows 10, making hundreds of PCs useless unless they are swapped with newer models or upgraded to Windows 11.