Refresh, restart, recycle, reinstall
Confused by whether to refresh, reset or reinstall? Windows has multiple options, and they’re changing all the time.
If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating new installation media for any version of Windows 10 past the Creators Update, you’ll probably feel a bit silly when you discover that Microsoft tucked a ‘fresh start’ option into its later Win 10 editions.
Using it takes any Windows 10 installation back to the basics of a Windows install, even removing any preinstalled software your manufacturer might have included, and stripping away all your drivers – and it doesn’t require any special media. It’s basically a clean install without you having to directly perform the actions of reinstallation. You’ll find it in a corner of Windows Defender Security Centre, aka Windows Security
– select Device performance and & health, then Additional info, before clicking Get started to begin. Again, make sure you’re backed up, as this is only slightly less destructive than formatting your hard drive. Handily, the fresh start procedure leaves a little note of all the things you’ve destroyed on your desktop, just so you can kick yourself later.
Press reset
A better option might be to take advantage of Windows 10’s ‘reset’ feature, which strips out all of your installed applications and drivers while giving you the option of leaving personal files unmolested. This doesn’t mean you can get away with not using proper backup procedures, but if there’s a particular software component causing you problems, this will very likely get rid of it. Put simply, it rolls your machine back to the state in which it came to you: preinstalled software, drivers, and all. You might remember that earlier editions included two options, the confusingly different ‘reset’ and ‘refresh’ – they’re squashed together into this new, less baffling procedure. It does, technically, create a fresh installation of Windows, rather than uninstalling anything, as while it’s running through, it uses the Windows Recovery Environment and sections off your personal files, putting them
back where they were if you choose to keep them.
If you’re insistent on reinstalling, perhaps you’d like to consider an upgrade? Not a version upgrade as such, but an in-place upgrade install – running through the Windows 10 install process, throwing fresh copies of all critical system files on to your PC, but leaving everything else, including software, as is.
Opting to do this can (in theory) fix certain issues with your machine, and it’s particularly effective against those problems that standard Windows prodding techniques don’t solve. To perform an in-place upgrade, you need to be logged into an administrative account, have a good chunk of disk space free, and have secure boot switched off (at least temporarily) in your UEFI settings.
Use the Windows 10 Media Creation tool (see above) to create a USB stick, but don’t boot from it: Open the drive from within Explorer, right-click the setup.exe file, and opt to run it with administrator privileges. Run through the install process, ensuring you check the box to keep all your files and apps. When done, you’re left with your new, fresh Windows folder and a separate Windows.old folder on your main drive, the latter of which contains your previous install. It’s possible to roll back, if everything has fallen apart, but don’t take this as an excuse not to have a proper backup. When happy (you have ten days to decide), you can dump the Windows. old folder and reclaim that precious space.