Gameguru Mania

[ggrobot]

The Building Windows 8 blog has the skinny on refresh and reset, which provide different avenues for reinstalling the operating system:

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Source: GGMania headlines
GGMania.com - Daily Gaming and Tech news

[Tom]

Why do I not care at all about Windows 8? Perhaps likely the fact this shit can just be added to Windows 7. This is just a cheap excuse to try and make new financial roads. It's the same as Win7, nothing has changed. I'll guarantee you too that you will need a mouse regardless of this BS they show. It's not even worth reporting.

[Baconnaise]

It would have been worth my time if they had an actual reserved partition that saves snapshots or images for me compressed. Command line isn't anything new here and it would have been best if they had an actual gui and settings panel for this. I wouldn't need third party software to accomplish the same thing at home. One other thing that would be nice is nlite etc built in. I'm not really concerned with formatting a drive as it's child's play. The only reason a home user needs to refresh or restore an image anyways is usually related to a trojan or virus. The current implementation shown doesn't seem useful as any trojan with the OS in mind is going to bypass or disable these features. Best sure method is image restore or format and install new.

Two sata 6Gb striped and dvd drive make short work on reinstalling windows even if you start fresh. Half an hour of time for updates and app/driver installs at the most isn't that bad. Image restoration knocks that down to a few minutes.

[Csimbi]

The idiots at MS are once again going into the wrong direction.
I can't say I am surprised though - seems to be the trend nowadays with that hillibilly on top of their food chain.

Guess what. I want to be able to restore my OS to its original state in five minutes. Without using any backups.
But my dear MS, why do I have to do it in 30+ minutes?!?

I could do it in five minutes on DOS, manually. With a few batch files, even less.
Why can't I do that on Windows?

Perhaps you already forgot how it's done. Here you go:
1. Check files (replace changed ones).
2. Replace config.sys and autoexec.bat with the standard ones.
3. Reboot.
All done in 5 minutes (because boot takes approx. 2 minutes).

In WinDOS, the process could be quite similar:
1. Check files (replace changed ones).
2. Replace the registry with the standard one.
3. Reboot.
There. All done. WinDOS includes way too much rubbish so checking the files might take longer, but it could still be done in 5 minutes because the boot time is supposed to be 30 seconds (according to MS at least).

If there's one new year's resolution that I would like to hear from MS, it would be this one:
"This year, we will learn from our mistakes and hence, avoid creating bad designs."

[gx-x]

you can't replace 18GB of small files in just 5 minutes even with SSD drives. Also, reinstall of windows over the existing one (repair) does exactly that - checks files, replaces those that have been changed, but usually windows files themselves are not the problem but some 3rd party apps and registry corrpution (or viruses/malware) so "refresh" would fix nothing in most cases. I would much rather have OSX's (or prehistoric Amiga workbench) approach to install of programs - each app keeps it's registry files and config files in it's own folder, no user/appdata/crap/morecrap/ crap. OR give me an option to backup programs that I choose with their respective reg and config files, after that, make me an data restore point that I can use on a fresh windows. But that ain't gonna happen because they COULD allow for transferring registered software from one machine to another and making a pirate heaven ... So just because of pirating we ain't EVER gonna have a good feature in windows and we must resort to restore points or whole image of drive. Well, I ain't gonna go and make 1TB image, nooooo way.

Also, for everyone's info, install windows from flash drive, it's 10x faster than from DVD.

[Baconnaise]

Yea I just used my USB3 flash drive on two installs recently. It's a dream compared to dvd that's for sure. Best part is being able to update the installation at a whim to save even more time.