In a nutshell: If you don't have an optical drive in your computer (the devices that hold shiny BDs, DVDs, or CDs) and you want to install Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 on that computer, you'll need to put the installation files on a bootable media.

Fortunately, the ubiquitous and inexpensive flash drive, or other USB-based drive, is a perfect solution. While many computers don't have optical drives, they all have USB ports…thankfully.

Once you have the installation files on a flash drive, which I will show you in this tutorial, you can proceed with the actual Windows 8 installation process. We have a full tutorial on that as well, but we'll get to that at the end.

Before you begin, you will need the following three things: