Windows 8 readies push-button PC refresh, reset
January 5, 2012 by Nancy Owano 
Resetting your Win 8 PC
(PhysOrg.com) -- Windows 8 is to deliver two new features that could help mute a past history of being the company that delivers blue screens of death and malware magnets. Briefly, Windows 8 is going to make Windows easier to deal with than ever before. Considering the competition Microsoft now faces, the time is ripe for this kind of pronouncement. In a blog dated January 4, the Windows 8 engineering team reveals two new options, refresh and reset.
Both functions will be at the push of a button to help users easily reset or refresh their PCs. “The power of personalization is something we all love about PCs,” said a Microsoft Steven Sinofsky,” but sometimes there is good reason to want to roll back to an earlier state. Most consumer electronics devices today can be reset to some factory state, and so we built this capability into Windows 8 too.”
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In the post authored by Desmond Lee, a Microsoft program manager, the new push-button options will empower the user to refresh or reset their machines. The latter function will be useful for those who want to give their machines to somebody else, such as a family member or coworker, and at the same time want to scrub everything off that they have downloaded. Hitting reset allows complete program and data wipeout and a fresh Windows install.As for the refresh function, Lee said that “misconfigured settings are sometimes the cause of problems that lead to customers needing to refresh their PCs. To ensure that Refresh is both effective in fixing problems and in making sure customers don’t lose settings that they might have trouble reconfiguring, we’ve thought a great deal about which settings to preserve.”
In the refresh, Windows 8 is to preserve wireless network connections, mobile broadband connections, BitLocker and BitLocker To Go settings, Drive letter assignments, personalization settings such as lock screen background and desktop wallpaper. While the core settings are backed up, the refresh will not keep file-type associations, display settings, and Windows firewall settings.
As for business environments, where Windows 8 might be deployed across the entire corporation’s PCs, a blogger outside Microsoft said that this does not necessarily spell out the demise of IT support; only that their troubleshooting rounds may be eased.
In sum, the reset removes all personal data, apps, and settings from the PC and reinstall Windows. The refresh keeps all personal data, Metro style apps, and important settings from the PC, but reinstalls Windows. The time required doing a refresh or a reset is an estimated eight minutes and 22 seconds for a refresh and six minutes and 12 seconds for a quick reset. The Register notes that these numbers are based on a Samsung PC with an i5 processor and 4GB of RAM running the Windows 8 developer preview handed out at the Build Conference in September.
A thorough reset takes 23 minutes and 52 seconds. The “thorough” option will write random patterns to every sector of the drive, overwriting existing data visible to the operating system.
More information: http://blogs.msdn. … your-pc.aspx
© 2011 PhysOrg.com
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Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 3 / 5 (22)
This will also make tech support easier. Instead of having to learn the whole English language to deal with their American customers, now tech support just needs to learn a few key phrases like "Sir have you pressed the big red button yet? Go ahead and press it."
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 3.8 / 5 (22)
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 5 / 5 (11)
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 5 / 5 (9)
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 5 / 5 (4)
I also think that virus writers will find a way to work around this.
It will be interesting to see where this goes and if it lasts beyond the first service pack. IMHO, being a long-time computer software engineer, the "dummy" class of computer user that needs this to combat say viruses, is exactly the class that is going to have a lot of problems. IMHO, not getting a virus is easy if you follow certain best practices.
Lastly, the source of this article, The Register, is loathed for providing useless and not necessarily true information.
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 5 / 5 (5)
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: not rated yet
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 5 / 5 (1)
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 3.8 / 5 (38)
Jan 05, 2012
Rank: 1 / 5 (1)
It would be nice if microsoft could solve their problems, eliminating any need for a feature such as this. The idea is that the computer should not have problems to begin with. Like a Mac, for example. Or the computer in the car, or the microwave oven, or the one in the tv, or the one in my cheap cell phone. All of those work fine all the time. oops, yes, I know, they are all proprietary operating systems, but that's a good thing.
I do still like Windows though,, can't help it, the games, the freedom of software choices, the ability to customize your PC however you like, are all truly great things, and I love that. So I'm not bashing Windows in anyway.
Jan 06, 2012
Rank: 2.6 / 5 (5)
Jan 06, 2012
Rank: 3.7 / 5 (12)
I can't wait to see that button on the Win8 SERVER EDITION. What kind of morons would buy a 24/7 server with a big reset button? Corporate Americans, apparently. That stuff is tantamount to admitting you suck. They should sell MS servers at Wally mart.
Jan 06, 2012
Rank: 2.3 / 5 (3)
PS this is what happens when you outsource the work to third world countries. FAIL
Jan 06, 2012
Rank: 4 / 5 (1)
Jan 06, 2012
Rank: not rated yet
I took the same approach with Ghost, but now with Image for Linux since Ghost dropped Linux support, and I agree, it is simply the best method of doing something like this because you can return to a known good state where you may not have to reinstall all your software. This is the one thing not explicitly stated in this article - that if you "reset" you will need to reinstall your software.
However, I would not put the blame on third-world countries. I would put the blame on execs who pretend to know what they are doing.
Jan 08, 2012
Rank: 4.5 / 5 (2)
m/s have always produced a bad o/s then a good one then a bad one..
win 95, bad, 98, good, mil, bad, xp good.. vista.. OMG, win 7 good.. for m/s operating systems. but bad compared to every other o/s.
i expect win 8 to be really bad with a few good features. my real money is on windows 9..