Thursday, August 22, 2013

Windows 8 Refresh and Reset Features


When Windows 8 gets corrupted, users now have two options: refresh and reset.

The first is the less extreme of the two. It reinstalls Windows 8 but preserves personal settings and personal data. It does this by saving the settings and data on a separate partition in the hard drive, installing a fresh copy of the operating system then restoring the data and settings.




It also preserves any Windows8 modern apps that were installed on the machine. Traditional Windows apps, however, have to be manually reinstalled.

Reset lets users start over. It wipes away the operating system, settings, data and applications and reinstalls a factory-fresh copy of Windows 8. It's as if the machine is fresh out of the box.

Windows 8 offers what it calls a thorough option for wiping out data during a reset. If the purpose of resetting was to erase sensitive data from the hard drive and make it unrecoverable, the thorough option writes random bits over all sectors of the hard drive. While it doesn't make the data unrecoverable, it would require expensive gear that most people can't afford, Microsoft says.

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