Choosing the Reset option enables you to immediately select whether to
keepyourfilesornot.Yourappsaretoasteitherway.
The holy trinity of system spying: Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and Event
Log.Youcanaddtothesewiththirdpartyapplicationstoo.Windows 10
OS refresh
November 2019 | |^17
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 10
days to decide), you can dump the
Windows.old folder and reclaim that
precious space.
Building better backups
Reinstalling is, or should be, a last resort – and if you ever come to the point where
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might be too late. A hardware failure, a cryptographic malware attack, whatever the
case may be, you don’t want to be left stranded. We’ve talked about using Windows’
File History tools elsewhere, which is a good way to keep regular copies of your
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form of Backup and Restore (Windows 7). Now, we can’t be entirely sure how long
this is going to last, given its archaic name, but for now, it works, and we’d wager
that Microsoft will supply a tool to restore its backups even if the facility gets
removed from future versions of the operating system. If you have a backup on an
external drive, you can reinstall Windows from scratch and restore it using the same
tool – aim to make one every week or so, so you don’t lose too much time. EaseUS
Todo Backup 11 Free (www.easeus.com) is a decent option for automating backups;
make sure, if you do this, that you don’t leave your backup drive permanently
connected to your machine, because a hardware failure passed down the line is a
double whammy of disappointment.
Do not discount the power of system restore points, either. While they’re not kind
to storage – we’d put them on your mechanical long-term storage drive, rather than
an SSD, if you have the choice – making a system restore point regularly is good
practice. Taking the overkill position of making one before installing anything even
slightly questionable is an even better thing to do, although we don’t really expect
you to do that. Make sure you clean up when you’re sure your machine is running
ÀQHEHFDXVHDKXJHKRDUGRIV\VWHPUHVWRUHSRLQWVGRHVQRERG\DQ\JRRGIt’s an older tool, sir, but it checks out. Backup and Restore has been with
us for a long time, but does things File History doesn’t.