My Ethereum Playbook

Parity

The simple route: parity.io

***Validate that your system time is exact: time.is , or you won't be able to find peers

Geth

From experience, installing & running geth (go-ethereum) through Ubuntu Subsystem on Windows 10 wasn't worth the hassle. These are some steps to get up and running relatively quickly.

Install

https://ethereum.github.io/go-ethereum/downloads/

External Drive Use - Windows

Requirements: SSD drive with at least 30GB (64 GB USB stick works well)

1. Create symbolic link to external drive mklink /D "C:\Users\Christopher\AppData\Roaming\Ethereum" "D:\ethereum"
2. Downloading the chain data (can take up to 3-6 hours, recommend --cache 4096 if you have 16GB RAM) geth --datadir "D:\ethereum" --cache 2048

Get Syncing Status

1. Run geth attach
2. 100 * eth.syncing.currentBlock / eth.syncing.highestBlock for percent complete
3. eth.syncing for full details

Develop

1. Install solidity from Visual Studio Code marketplace
2. Use the test-net geth --testnet console

Install Wallet

Now that you have the full chain, download the wallet

1. https://github.com/ethereum/mist/releases