Windows 11 Will Let You Reinstall Your OS Through Windows Update Without Wiping...

Windows 11 Will Let You Reinstall Your OS Through Windows Update Without Wiping Your Files

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• Re:

  You have to wipe the whole disk to install a newer version of Windows (or reinstall it)?

  That blows my mind...

  • Re:

    not really, one can upgrade their way from windows 3 up to 10 or 11 without ever formatting the disk... there was a rash of youtube video's showing this a few years ago with outrageous thumbnails of some dipshit doing their best fake shocked face

    though in the older versions where they tend to bloat themselves to the point of being non functional, there was a good reason, not as much anymore unless the system gets hosed (like this machine technically at one point this was a windows 7 install that got upgrad

    • Re: time and effort?

      Windows 3? Don't be so hyperbolic.

      The disk io drivers and shit aren't there. You'd be hard pressed to go from XP to 11. XHCI drivers for modern hardware don't exist for old windows. Even USB would be challenging pre-7 at times.

      • Re:

        you dont need drivers if your using IDE, or SATA in "legacy" or "IDE Mode" its handled by the bios.
        One of my hobbies is fixing up old computers so I have a old tower PC in the garage, its a 6 core Phenom II with 8 gigs of ram and a 250gig SATA drive in it, I partitioned off 20 gigs to FAT32 and 2 gigs to FAT16 and it happily boots into MS-DOS 6.22 and windows 95 (with the rest of the space given to Linux Mint, though it will run windows 10 ok enough) and yea it wont recognize a lot of hardware but file mana

    • Re:

      Win 3 used FAT as a file system. Modern Windows (for want of a better word) uses NTFS and ReFS. I wont bore you with FAT16 vs FAT32 and vFAT and all that shite.

      I wasted hours/days/weeks etc fiddling with himem.sys and autoexec.bat. I had a boot disc featured on Novell's Cool Solutions, which managed to get a network up and running etc. Memory management back in the day, mandated by MS was wank - really wank. That was Windows 3.x and frankly Win 95 and on wasn't much better.

      • Re:

        yea cause microsoft never made a conversion utility, first time I found out about it was in windows 2000 (might have been there in NT4, not sure)

        hell I just checked its still there in windows 10

      • Re:

        There were also conversion utilities built into various versions of Windows both to convert FAT16 to FAT32 and FAT to NTFS. There are plenty of videos out there of people upgrading versions of Windows all the way from 1 to 7, 8, 10, 11, whatever is current. It ends up pretty messy by the end but technically works.

        As far as memory management, while DOS was a mess by Windows 95 you could get away with not really ever touching it if you didn't want/need to. If you still had some higher-complexity DOS stuff to

• Re:

  Start/Settings/System/Recovery/Reset this PC then select Keep my personal files. Or hit start and type reset, and it should show up.
  
  The difference here with this new feature is that it seems to also preserve Windows settings and applications. Not sure why someone would actually want that, since you are usually doing a reset because some combination of applications and/or settings is fucking something up.
  
  Of course, if Windows had a decent system backup/restore feature built in, one users could easily use

  • Re:

    Yeah gotta give Apple credit on that front, I remember doing Time Machine restores and doing OSX reinstalls with no extra devices like a decade ago (just go into boot manager and it downloads the OS).

    Of course they have an advantage of "If you own a Mac then you own the OS" but even today Microsoft's amalgam of various tools is nowhere as clean cut as Apples method for restores and reinstallations.

  • Re:

    Sounds like they are trying to copy MacOS: it can reinstall the OS in recovery mode and keeps all apps, settings, files in place. Learned this one day when a system update was caught in a reboot and try to apply loop, with Apple Support walking me through the reinstall the OS only part and it worked.

  • Re:

    Could they be trying to make a front end or graphical replacement to SFC or DISM?
    
    sfc/scannow
    Dism/Online/Cleanup-Image/ScanHealth
    Dism/Online/Cleanup-Image/RestoreHealth
    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/repair-a-windows-image?view=windows-11 [microsoft.com]

  • Re:

    If I had to guess based on nothing but speculation, this probably basically wipes the driver caches of driver updates/third party installed ones, forcing the system to use included (or maybe only fully vetted) drivers, resets dlls and other libraries to known-good versions and refreshes the WinSxS setup, and maybe resets some core part of the registry. A large part of Windows issues are drivers getting screwed up in some way or system files getting mixed up. Probably something to make sure malware is taken

• What about apps?

  Personal files are no biggie. There are only a few directories where one has them, and a USB drive is your friend.

  The part everyone hates about a Windows clean install or getting a new computer is reinstalling your application programs. That your apps don't transfer over is a feature, not a bug, I guess to the people selling you those apps.

  Nowadays, it is nothing like olden times when I had dozens of specialty programs purchased on CD-ROMs or gosh forbid, floppy disks, with authentication keys cramme

  • Re:

    You can make it less painful using Chocolatey to manage the software in your machine (it's a Linux style package manager). It's not perfect, updates are often slow, but it mostly gets the job done.

    In theory your settings should be preserved as they are part of your user profile. I wonder if this feature manages to keep them.