A raspberry PI works just like a normal computer except that its hard drive is a sd card.
Which means the OS installation is a bit different. But also much simpler than installing a “normal” operating system.

Good news is the raspberry pi team made the process even easier through the Raspberry Pi Imager.

First step is to download it with the link below:

Alright now we can start the imager.

Click the Choose OS button to show the list of available images to flash.

Best is to just use the latest 32bits image.

But you might want to have a look at the other ones.
For example if might want to choose the 64bits versions if your Pi allows it.

The best part of the raspebrrypi imager is how easy it is to setup things like wifi and remote access (ssh).

Click the settings icon.

On the settings page there are two main sections we want to check.

First is the Enable SSH that should be checked.

Then in the Configure wireless LAN, enter the SSID and password for your home wifi.

Alright now let's insert the SD-Card in your computer.

No need to format it or anything.

Click the Choose Storage button to show the list of available disks, and select your sd card.

Aaaaand now we click the write button, and then we wait..

If all went well at the previous step, you can insert the sd-card into your raspberry pi and power it.

Now we’re ready to actually use our newly created hard drive, make sure to eject it from windows before removing it from your sd-card slot.

Place the sd-card inside the raspberry PI card slot, and plug it to its USB power supply.

At that point you should see the green led blinking to indicate that something is happening.

Alright, we have a raspberry PI that should have booted completely, this could take up to 2 minutes for the first run.

Now we want to connect to it from our windows machine. Usually that requires knowing the IP address of the device, which is a problem here, we have no keyboard or screen to do anything!

Don’t worry there’s another way to find the raspberry pi without knowing its IP address.
The trick is to find the raspberry pi by its name, most network devices have a name to easily find them, the raspberry pi is no exception here.

If you are using windows and don’t have iTunes already installed, you will certainly need to install this software to enable discovery by name: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL999?locale=en_US

Note for non windows users: Open a terminal window, and type ssh pi@raspberrypi.local then type the password: raspberrypi. Don't worry if the terminal doesn't write anything as you type your password, it's normal.

The program used to remotely control a raspberry PI is called "ssh", it’s mostly a linux thing at first, but windows can connect to ssh enabled devices too.

To use ssh on windows, you will need a software called "Putty", install and run it.

https://www.putty.org/

At the top of the window there is a Host parameter, set it to raspberrypi.local, make sure the port is 22 and the connection type is set to ssh.
Press connect, and press Yes when some sort of security alert shows up.

It will then ask you for a username, type pi, and then a password, type raspberry.

You should now be connected to your raspberry PI.

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