Recently I had to test some SWT code under Windows 10. Therefore I decided to set up a virtual machine running Windows 10. Downloading Windows 10 disc image files is not as easy as it may seem.

The Microsoft Windows Media Creation Tool (MediaCreationTool.exe) can be used to download Windows 10 ISO image files. You have to run this program with administrative privileges. But it may not be sufficient to start the program using the “Run as Administrator…” option when being logged on as a user without administrator privileges:

To be able to use the tool successfully I had to start a desktop session using my administrator account. I have noticed this strange behaviour a few times before when dealing with other programs which required administrator privileges. And to be honest I really don’t have a clue what’s the cause of this strange behavior. If you have any hints please drop me a few lines in the comments section below.

Microsoft also provides direct download links for the Windows 10 ISO files. But your browser will only get redirected to the page with the direct download links if it sends a user agent string indicating that you are using an operating system other than Microsoft Windows (e.g. Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i586; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/31.0). To quickly change the user agent string of Mozilla Firefox there exist dozens of addons. At the moment I use an Add-on called User-Agent Switcher.