Windows 8 might be a little while away (perhaps with a release some time next year) but one thing that caught my eye browsing the web today was the potential new feature being the concept of the “system reset”. Granted, this was shown off in a leaked image but it’s interesting to see what might be happening early on in the next major version of Windows.
In many cases, people encounter situations where something partially or completely hoses Windows such as malware and virus infections. Otherwise, after many years of usage, there is just so much cruft left on the computer that the computer struggles to complete even the most basic of tasks.
Often, people are put off by the investment of time required to wipe a system, reinstall Windows, reinstall applications and then the process of downloading and installing all of the Windows patches. Otherwise, people may simply not know how to restore their system from scratch by themselves (despite receiving recovery discs and instructions with their computer). Building in a function to take care of the restoration process with one (or maybe two clicks if you include an “are you sure?” response) would make the process very quick.
Of course, returning a computer to its “out of the box” state is only half the job – reinstalling all of the applications can take a good amount of time. Luckily, you can use a tool like Ninite to automatically download and reinstall a good number of popular applications without much effort. As always, you could always restore from a pristine backup but a lot of people wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of making one (let alone knowing how to do it) so fingers crossed that this feature makes it into the final build of Windows 8.
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