[Tutorial] How to get windows 10 ISO directly from microsoft

Windows doesn’t want you to download straight ISOs from their site, and downloading the media maker and going through all that is annoying as hell. If you are on windows, it takes away your ability to do the direct ISO download when it sees you are on windows. This will make it think you’re not on windows and grant you that option.

  1. Open chrome (not sure how to easily change user agent on firefox)
  2. Go here: Download Windows 10
  3. Open dev tools
    1. ctrl shift i
  4. Click 3 dots in top right
  5. go down to more tools > network conditions and click it

  1. Next, in the bottom panel, scroll down to user agent, uncheck the box, and choose “chrome – mac”

  2. Reload the page

  3. The download should appear. If it hasn’t, ctrl shift r to refresh without cache.

Hope it works for you. It has worked for me over the last couple of years when they removed that ability. Helps save some time every time I need to update my ventoy ISO. They seem to want you to actually get windows 11, though, and so allow direct downloads for their ISOs. lol

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This remains funny to me. Linux and Mac users just get the ISO, Windows users are 2nd class citizens to M$ lol

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Windows users are second class citizens to toaster users. Useless AI bs and taking away features instead of useful features that would actually earn them upgrades like raid1 for boot drives. I can see why they would want to hinder people going back to windows 10, but their inconsistency based on what you are on tells a different story.

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And it’s only windows 10 that they did this with. Windows 11 you can get the iso without going thru the media creation tool.

You can also just

  • ctrl-shift-i to bring up the inspection panel
  • ctrl-shift-m to toggle the device toolbar
  • make sure an apple or android device is selected in the drop down at the top
  • refresh or load the windows 10 download page.

Changing the device also changes the user agent to match whatever device is selected so the effect will be the same.

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Why not get it straight from Rufus? Most people use that to make a bootable USB anyway.

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The question there is where does rufus get their iso from? Since it’s an unknown source and thus not trusted.

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I think this should be expanded on, or at least linked to with a wiki.

Great work @Rat

Direct from Microsoft. They get a new download link every 24 hours cause that’s how long the microsoft links last. Microsoft even links to Rufus in a lot of their web pages on how to make a bootable USB from an ISO file. Its plenty safe.

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You sure? I don’t see that listed in the screen shot or know where that is posted on there site!

Yes Im sure. That is why in order to download the ISOs with Rufus you have to have auto updates turned on, because it has to pull a new download link every time you try. The script to do so is also available on Github. You can also hash check the SHA-1 of the ISO to verify it is unmodified.
Do you really think official Microsoft support pages would link to what software to use if that software was inserting malware?

Here is a post from a dev about it too:

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Nice share, thanks!

Didn’t know that, thank you! I’ll check it out later.

Ahh … Now there is the linked relevant evidence. I’ve got issues going thru third parties for software that should be gotten from the source. Way to many times the third party source is infected.

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That also works, thank you! It’s also much simpler and quicker lol

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Still will include the key that legal or you have to google around for that ?

It’s a great feature of the inspection panel. Being able to just drag to change the viewport width without having to resize the entire browser window to see how content reacts is very handy when looking for issues with responsive layouts.

The GUI shortcut can also be found in the top left of the inspection panel.
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Sounds like something that can be made into a greasmonkey script. Thanks for the info.

I kept getting an error before downloading. I changed user agent to Chrome-Chrome OS, then I was able to get to the 32bit/64bit download buttons. Downloading as I type.

For downloading old Windows 10 ISO, os.click is a great website.