Hello, world. I've been lurking on this forum for about 2 and a half years now, and I think I finally have something relevant enough to post! I've always been a big fan of Windows 8's factory reset feature. However, since I build my own computers, I don't have a built-in recovery partition. In effect, that means I have had to insert my Windows 8 install media (a DVD, of all things) to reset. Obviously, it's much more simple to obtain legitimate install media now, and having a Windows 8.1 install USB saves a lot of time, but that still isn't really an optimal way to reset. I've been testing the Windows 10 builds for a while, and this is the first time I noticed this happening. (build 10130) When I select the Reset option in Settings > Update & security > Recovery, it does not require installation media. More importantly, it keeps important drivers intact. This is a huge deal for me! I have a NVidia discrete video card, and normally after a reset I would have to reinstall those drivers while working at 800x600 resolution. Now, after a reset, the same driver version is still installed. Has anyone else noticed this? I haven't been able to find any similar observations anywhere else, so I hope I'm not missing something.
This is designed to eliminate recovery partitions. The driving force behind this is low priced laptops to compete with Chromebooks.
If your building your own, you should be partitioning, dual booting, and imaging. I can restore any windows image in less than 4 min. with zero downtime.
Microsoft also said awhile back that the plan was to keep all windows updates installed, so a user would not have to reinstall all of his OS updates. Haven't tested this myself.
That would be a big time saver! Currently a Win8 "refresh" takes less than 30min- but the 100+ updates take a full couple of hours after the refresh. No recovery partition will be good news for small SSD's too.
I noticed drivers staying installed with Win 10 reset on my tablet, really nice feature, unless a bad driver is the reason you need to reset lol
As a Microsoft Refurbisher I am required to give a complete Backup/Recovery USB Sata drive with each laptop or desktop I refurbish and sell. 12 years ago I worked with some system developers and designed a complete bits and bytes backup/recovery system. With a stand-a-lone boot CD we can backup and restore any Microsoft Operating System, XP, Vista, 7, 8, and now 10, all within less than a hour. This software allows not only the Microsoft software, but all of the installed users software with activation codes so nothing is lost. With this Backup/Recovery system we can even back up a Dell system and restore it to HP, Lenovo or other hardware and all drivers are updated. We teach our users and students to keep all their personal data on outbound USB devices so that only Operating software and other manufacturers software is on the primary partition all done in less than 100GB partition. I have just built a complete Windows 10 Build 10162 with Office 2013, Adobe Acrobat, Safari, Itunes, Quicktime, Real Player, Cleaner, Boostspeed, Team Viewer, VLC, Beyond Compare and some other software, all done in under 20GB's. With the Restore CD software I can create Desktops and Laptops in less than 30 minutes. This is how I will build Windows 10 systems and the activations go along on all of the systems without any failures.
Actually refurbishers are prohibited from providing custom external recovery media but you are allowed to bundle a program to create such media. Your options are to provide a recovery partition or a hologram DVD.
Actually you are incorrect. My agreement is that if I refurbish a desktop or laptop, I have to give the user a complete backup/restore of the desktop/laptop as of the build. Not like the old way of giving a user a recovery cd and if they were to restore from that they lose everything that had added after the install, and they would have lost all of their updated information.
I've been playing with this. Pretty fast & yes, updates remain. If you Reset, your apps are gone. It's only the OS & drivers that remain. Things like VC runtimes are gone. Nvidia drivers remain but the utils are gone. Office - gone. If you create a provisioning package then they should get restored. I haven't had any success with creating one though, scanstate is dodgy...
Yes this recoveryfunktions got better! I was able to change the edition without beeing required to boot specially from a boot-medium. Changeing editions always required a complete reformat (nuke) of the system in the past. I had installed a Enterprise-Preview and wanted to change it to a Professional-Preview on a quiet big spaceconstrained older tablet. I simply copied the iso of the other build to the desktop. Mounted the iso and started the setup.exe. Then I chose not to keep any data and after a few restarts the other edition apeared with any data. (in Windows_Old there where some Data I didn't needed from before) I've never changed an edition so easy before.
What is does is backup the drivers and lets PnP reinstall them. Whatever gets installed from the INF will remain anything needing a separate installer will be lost. Think of it as SYSDIFF 2.0.