Creating bootable USBs

So I have a laptop with no CD drive, and I want to put windows 7 on it instead of windows 8 (user preference). I found one thread online that said just to move the files to the bootable usb drive. So I did this without really think I had to do anything to make the USB bootable. No go. So I found this this useful :http://en.kioskea.net/faq/29462-windows-7-create-a-system-repair-usb-key. I used the DISKPART portion to format the usb and then I moved the files from the system generated repair disk (Backup Restore, Create a system image). Worked like charm.
Open the command prompt: "Run" -> CMD
And then type the following commands:
·         DISKPART · (This command will open the tool "diskpart")
·          list disk · (Look for the No. assigned to your USB key from the list that appears)
·          select disk 3 · (Where No. 3 correspond to your USB key)
·          clean
·          (This will delete this partition)
·          create partition primary
·          (Create a new partition)
·          active
·          (This will make your partition active - bootable)
·          format fs=fat32 quick
·          (Quick format in "fat32")
·          assign
·          (To assign a letter to your USB drive)
·          exit
·          (To exit diskpart)
·          exit
·          (To close the command prompt)

I had intended to boot to the recovery 'cd' and load a premade image from another computer, but because of HD size differences (HD the image was based on was bigger) I ended up not being able to pull the previous image. And the USB drive I was using wasn't big enough to have a complete w7 install on it (Dell factory CD) so I ended up formatting an external hard drive in FAT32 moved the contents of the w7 repair disk and that worked. The External HD wasn't anything big, 80GB, but I was getting an error saying the format failed because the volume was too large... yay.
To shrink the volume in diskpart, type in:
shrink desired=##### 
Replace the number signs with the amount you want to shrink it by. With my 80GB hd, I shrunk it by 50000, roughly 48GB and I was then able to format with FAT32(quick) and make it bootable.

In the future, I think I'll just get an external CD drive.