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  • blahsaysblah - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    The side effect of this in Windows 10 is that a factory reset is not real factory reset like in Windows 8.

    If you went ahead and used those Powershell commands on internet to uninstall all those mandatory Windows Apps. Well, that sticks through the current Reset option available in Win 10.

    That is not a clean install. That is not a factory reset. How can you be sure that you are really cleaning your system if you go to point that you need a reset.

    They still need a new version, where you can get a patched but official MS version of Windows 10 on Reset.

    Its nice to be able to roll your own... but a true factory reset option would be nice too.
  • eddman - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    I agree. Suppose your windows installation develops some minor issues, say UI related, that are annoying but not really worth doing a reset and you keep using it for more than a month.

    Then, some time later, you come across a new, major issue and have to reset, but since it's not a clean reset, those old, minor issues would still stick around.

    When I do a reset, I expect the end result to be completely clean.
  • blaktron - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    You guys are complaining about something that isn't a thing. Do you think Android and iOS are storing a second copy of themselves on storage in order to do a factory reset? No. So saying this "isn't a factory reset" is ridiculous.

    The files are all signed, and the signatures are checked during recovery. Its basically the same as the mobile OSes use, Mac OS X uses online repos.
  • blahsaysblah - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    I used too many words.

    I, me, myself, the user of my machine, ran some commands.

    At a future point, i needed to Reset my machine (had installed beta compilers,... easier to wipe).
    In Windows 8, a Factory Reset meant you get the same as a "Clean Install".

    Your only choice in Windows 10 is Reset. It did not give me a "Clean Install" state. Changes i had made persisted through the Reset.

    I talked to MS support and they are working on it. Who knows. I went and used actual DVD to get clean install.
  • boeush - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    The difference with Android and iOS is that they are free. If your storage gets corrupted (by malware, or via hardware failure, or due to OS/driver/software bugs), you could just download a clean image and side-load it onto your device.

    With Windows, there is no such option: if you want a clean reinstall/reset, you'd better have the original software on a restore partition or an optical disk or a USB stick or whatever - because if you don't, you'll be buying it again.
  • jimbo2779 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    what? Are you really saying if you lose something you have bought you have to buy it again?

    If you are comfortable side loading something onto a phone you are more than capable of finding an iso for your version of windows.
  • DarkXale - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Or just recreate the installer from here:
    https://www.microsoft.com/software-download/window...
  • kaidenshi - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    > With Windows, there is no such option

    Yes there is, and has been since Windows 7 was released. Microsoft offers ISO and USB images for their two most current OS releases (8.1 and 10 currently). The days of hunting the dark corners of the Web for possibly infected pirate ISO files have been over for nearly six years.
  • Gigaplex - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    And those ISOs don't contain the OEM drivers so it's not a factory install and lots of stuff may not work until you hunt down the drivers.
  • jimbo2779 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    I genuinely have no recollection of the last time I had to install a driver for anything to get my machine up and running after a fresh install. I do install the latest drivers to ensure everything is up to date but windows has had a workable version of drivers for everything I have plugged in for years now.

    Last week I was using an old MiniDV camera with a firewire card from 2006 and both worked flawlessly which was incredible as both were well outdated when even Windows 7 came around
  • aebiv - Sunday, October 25, 2015 - link

    Try having something a bit newer. Both my desktop and laptop require network, audio, and chipset drivers.
  • CaedenV - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Oh for goodness sake. If you can side-load an OS onto a phone then surely it is not that hard to go to your manufacturer's website and download drivers to go with your recovery media. You can even have most of those drivers install during the OS install by making an autounatend file with a driver folder on the install media. It is one extra step, sure... but it is a freaking PC that has vastly more hardware combinations, features, and capabilities compared to a phone or tablet, and it isn't THAT much harder to do.
  • jabber - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    You make that sound like a bad thing. I hate doing recovery installs on PCs and having 4+ year old drivers/bloatware to deal with. If I can do a clean/fresh install...all the better.

    Plus a competent IT guy downloads the drivers he might need before hand.
  • inighthawki - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Nearly all critical hardware has drivers available on disk, and OEM specific drivers can almost always be found on Windows Update these days. A fresh install of Windows 10 on my Lenovo Yoga 2 after a windows update had all the drivers automatically. A disc image with all the proper OEM drivers is nearly useless these days if you have an internet connection.
  • Samus - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Honestly, any PC made before 2015 already has drivers built into Windows 10 or on Windows Update.

    If future PC's don't have natively supported hardware, any reputable manufacture like HP, Dell and Lenovo provide a driver collection in a single file. I downloaded one the other day for a Pavilion x360 i3-5010U and it came out to 700MB. There was also a BIOS update that added "Windows 10 Support" whatever the hell that means ;)
  • Murloc - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    OEM drivers are available on the internet though. And as a bonus, you can avoid the bloatware.
  • CaedenV - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    actually, you can go to MS's website and download win10 installer for free with their Make Media option. You still need to provide a key (typically injected in Bios these days), but there is no need to go out and purchase physical media anymore unless you also need to buy a key to go with it.
  • egmccann - Wednesday, October 7, 2015 - link

    Actually, you don't need to provide a key if the installer has been run on that system before. I did the upgrade on my system, then decided (since it had run 7 for several years and it was past time for a general cleanup) to wipe and reinstall. While it *asked* for a key, I didn't give it one - and at the end of setup, went into the properties and saw ti sitting there, activated and happy.
  • epobirs - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    This is simply wrong. Windows 10 activation does not work like previous generations. You can easily obtain an image from Microsoft and do a clean install on a previously activated system.
  • xenol - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    Those two methods are practically identical. Aside from that, Microsoft provides a way for you to download a Windows 10 image you can use for reinstallation purposes. It may or may not be updated, but then again, neither is Android very often.
  • michael2k - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    The difference is that the user can modify a Windows PC. SIP on Mac OS X and iOS by default won't allow you to modify system files.
  • CaedenV - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    agreed. My wife was having issues with her desktop, but she did not complain until after the install was 30 days old. After doing a refresh most of the issues she was having persist and now I am going to have to do a full format/install... yay. With win8/8.1 when she had a problem a refresh would simply fix everything like the system was new.
  • Samus - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    If you need a "full restore" just download the ISO and make a thumb drive. Microsoft provides a utility that does both in one small program.
  • barleyguy - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    Windows 10 can still create a USB Recovery Disk. This allows you to format the drive and do a reset from the USB stick. If you create the USB stick the day you receive your computer (or upgrade to Windows 10), it is for all practical purposes a factory reset.
  • tipoo - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Cool. I only give Windows 10 70GB via bootcamp, and especially with a 4770HQ and 700MB/s SSD the performance impact should be negligible for the space saved. Will do this at home.
  • inighthawki - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    I'd be interested in knowing what the perf differences would be. Truth is, loading files from disk is so significantly slower than CPU processing power and memory bandwidth, that in many cases, compression/decompression can be done in-place with no hit in performance - and in some cases, it can actually improve performance by decreasing the bottleneck in the operation (i.e. read less from disk). This would of course only not be the case if the CPU was already fully utilized, in which case the compression/decompression cost can take away time spent elsewhere, such as loading other components on the system.
  • Gigaplex - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    It depends on how it's compressed. I got the impression that all the files would be compressed in a single large container, which would increase the amount of data to be read from disk for decompression.
  • extide - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    No it wouldn't, you dont need to read the whole file..
  • tipoo - Sunday, October 11, 2015 - link

    Turns out the Boot Camp partition was already using it - I ran it again and it caught a few new binaries to compress. It gets nearly the same disk read performance as natively under OSX. Can't tell the performance difference at all, and it saves a few gigs.

    Also did it on a Core 2 Duo system with a Momentus XT hard drive - still cant tell any performance hit.
  • jjj - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    More Windows advertising spam... adoption slows and like magic this kind of articles show up.
  • eddman - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Too many apple articles -> anandtech is paid by apple.
    Too many intel articles -> anandtech is intel's marketing wing.
    Too many MS articles -> anandtech's writers are MS shills.
    Too many nvidia articles -> anandtech is nvidia's PR division.
    Too many AMD articles -> anandtech's writers are on AMD's payroll.
    .
    .
    .

    There is always something, isn't it?
  • inighthawki - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    "There is always something, isn't it?"

    Don't forgot Google.
  • iLLz - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Didn't Win 10 just cross the 100 million install mark in less than 2 months? How is that slow adoption?
  • Gigaplex - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    It was initially fast, but it has tailed off and they're no longer on target to meet their projections.
  • Michael Bay - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    I`d very much like to know the current activation count. Show your sources.
  • DanNeely - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    MS numbers are likely not available publicly (the occasional press release not withstanding); but Steam's Hardware Survey is updated for the end of last month and shows W10 at 26% (vs IIRC 18% last month, and 5 or 6% 2 months ago). Looking at shares from the general browsing public, StatsCounter shows it at 7.6% vs 5.4% last month, NetMarketshare 6.6 vs 5.2%, W3Schools has 3.5% in August but doesn't have September data up yet.

    I'm not overly concerned that month 2 adoption was much less than month 1 because an initial surge much larger than following months is a fairly common pattern; especially since W10's launch was impacted by back to school shopping and a likely sales bump as a result. I've seen at least on news site that paid for weekly data from a webstats company and wrote an article on it; but the graphs they showed were noisy as hell and unsuitable for any sort of analysis in the raw format. Which didn't stop the person writing the article from writing an article and acting like a several percent jump in W7 numbers on the graph (at 8.x's expense) was a real signal and not one of the reasons why the companies don't release finer grained data to the general public.
  • Michael Bay - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link

    Yes, Steam is what I was looking at myself.
    I guess we`ll have to wait for their next survey or the one after that for a proper trend to emegre.
  • lilmoe - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    If we're assuming fair distribution of articles based on OS relevance in Anantech's article archive, then Windows coverage is pretty lacking...

    Anandtech is very short on technical articles about Windows and Windows technologies. For example, they just recently posted a tiny article about .NET Native after quite a while of its announcement.

    You sound like Apple fans on The Verge who outrageously claim "lack of coverage of Apple related articles"....
  • Michael Bay - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Who in his right mind would even read that SJW-infested rag?
    When they got mossberg`d, I thought even the most dense will see that it`s dead.
  • Mumrik - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link

    There is no more important piece of software a site with its roots in PC tech could cover.
  • ytoledano - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Why can't recovery be done over the Internet? The recovery partition can contain just enough software to connect and download a good image. That image can be kept up-to-date over time. The only drawback is that you need a broadband connection to recover.
  • boeush - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Recovery partitions frequently include custom hardware drivers and OEM software specific to the device and its features. For a scheme such as you propose to work, all vendors would have to subscribe to this global update database, keeping it always current with respect to their various devices and their iterations.
  • jimbo2779 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    or keep those necessary drivers on the partition. A bunch of drivers would be a lot smaller than a whole OS.
  • CaedenV - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    MS keeps a pretty large cache of drivers already. I would be surprised if they didn't already have them on file.
  • CoreLogicCom - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    I would like to see consumer pcs adopt what hp does with its servers. You get a built in setup system on a rom and it downloads the latest drivers for everything in the system and then injects those drivers into the windows iso as it gets loaded on the hard drive so by the time you boot the OS the first time it has all the latest drivers already loaded and ready to go.
  • kpb321 - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    It's nice that you can turn this on for any system you want. Might be a good reason to upgrade my wife to windows 10. Her Windows 7 install has grown a bit bloated from updates and her 60gb ssd is getting a bit full. I wouldn't mind getting her back 3 more gbs on top of what ever upgrading to a fresh version of windows without all the patching bloat saves.
  • mkozakewich - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Upgrading from Win 8 to Win 10 saved me over 10 GB, for some reason. It might be a good idea.

    (You still might want to wait until the massive Windows 10 update I was hearing about slated for October.)
  • Kvaern2 - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Bet that was mostly your winsxs directory getting the cleanup treatment.

    That's the best thing about Win10 if you ask me. I've seen 30-40GB winsxs dirs on Win7/8.
  • extide - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    MS has a tool called deepclean that will purge the winsxs folder of patches that have been superseded by other patches. It can free up significant amounts of space if you have a very old install.
  • eddman - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Have you used Disk Cleanup lately? Run it, click on "Clean up system files" button and let it scan again. See how much is listed under "Windows Update Cleanup". You might want to clean that. Also, restart the computer after the cleanup.

    I'd also suggest you get the TreeSize program and see exactly what's taking up too much space.
  • CaedenV - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    +1 under the advanced options you can remove old update files, previous versions of Windows, and all sorts of things that cause bloat.
    Also, if you are running with 8GB of RAM or more (and what good nerd does not have their wife on at least 8GB of ram?) then you can disable the page file. Once disabled you can delete it and bam, lots of free space opens up (equal to the amount of ram installed... so 8+GB).
  • Alexvrb - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Disabling the page file is not the best advice anymore, for modern versions of Windows. Frankly if handled correctly I'm not convinced it was ever good advice to disable it entirely. Unless you're REALLY REALLY desperate for storage space and yet somehow have gobs of RAM. Anyway here's the thing: Windows intelligently stores only the least used stuff in your pagefile, so anything you actually need stays in RAM (unless you run out, in which case the pagefile would be saving your bacon anyway). It also provides a nice safety blanket against a hard program crash and doesn't hurt anything... except a little storage. I'd rather use Win10's CompactOS option and just about any other tweak instead of disabling paging.
  • blahsaysblah - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    You have serious miss-understanding what a pagefile is and its purpose and how it functions inside the VMM domain.

    Pagefile bad.

    If you dont have a lot of RAM. Its actually even better to turn off pagefile and than figure out what to stop doing/running. You absolutely never want to use a pagefile. Especially on weaker systems.
  • Kvaern2 - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Amen, I haven't used a pagefile since Win2K and haven't experienced a single issue because of it.
  • doggface - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Sorry. But I call Bulls%%t.
    A small pagefile (30-60%) of RAM size is absolutely a good idea for overflow protection, and has virtually no downside. (Especially on an SSD)

    If you want to be a super neck beard about it then put the pagefile on a ram disk, but removing the pagefile... Is absurd and self-defeating.
  • Reflex - Monday, October 5, 2015 - link

    As a former kernel engineer for Windows Thanks to those discrediting the 'disable the page file' crowd. That and most tweaking ceased to have any real world benefit with the move from Win9x (which I worked on) to Windows XP (which I also worked on). At best a user gains no positive impact. At worst you get random bad behavior that you may or may not realize is due to your tweaks.
  • CaedenV - Friday, October 2, 2015 - link

    Interesting. I did it on mine and it is enabled even though I have a lot of space (512GB SSD), I wonder why that was turned on by default, and if that has any kind of performance hit... granted, still faster than win7 on the same box so I guess I can eat that performance hit for the sake of a few extra GB of space
  • blahsaysblah - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Windows pagefile's purpose is purely to give you more "simulated" RAM via your HDD/SDD.

    You should never be using simulated RAM.

    The concept was created many decades ago to allow completion of batch jobs that ran over days/weeks. Your PC activity is meant to be reactive.

    Turn off pagefile always. If you dont have enough RAM to run your workflow, change your workflow to fit in you RAM. Not the other way around. Many orders of magnitude difference.

    Its never OK to to have a pagefile on a PC.

    And you dont delete pagefiles... For very long time. Disable it and windows deletes it. If you are talking about hibernate file, just issue "powercfg /h off" in an Admin CMD shell. That also does not require manual deletion.
  • jabber - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    If you look up on the MS websites you'll find that the Pagefile is pretty much just there for crash dumps and any old legacy software that has to detect if a Pagefile exists on the system without having a hissy fit. Otherwise it's redundant.
  • DanNeely - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Which is a worse user experience? Inadvertantly exceeding your total physical ram limit and having things start to slow down because stuff is being swapped, or to have software randomly crash because allocations fail with no warning/explanation of what's going on? A few months ago I had the "pleasure" of dealing with the latter on an older box following it's being upgraded to W7 by someone with the same misguided attitude about page files despite the box not having enough ram to run all the software we needed without on concurrently. It was hell until we got it turned back on, 10-25% swap usage is barely noticeable. (Although the version N+1 memory requirements for one piece of software we use jumped by enough to finally overcome if it aint broke don't replace it inertia and have hardware upgrades finally get scheduled for the workstations.)

    By all means, size your ram large enough that you shouldn't exceed it in normal operation; but leave it on so your system doesn't start blowing up if you end up using too much stuff.
  • inighthawki - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link

    When your page file is disabled and you approach your physical memory commit limit, Windows will tell you you're low on memory. That is an indicator to the user to close some stuff before that happens, and is also a hint to go buy more memory if you need it. A page file will instead just slow down your system, quite drastically. Cue the typical "my computer is running slower than when I bought it" montage.

    Also with 8GB+ as your standard amount of memory on new PCs this day, your average user almost never exceeds this amount.
  • DanNeely - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link

    None of my W7/8/8.1 computers have ever given a notice about running out of system ram and having to swap. If you have a fixed size pagefile turned on there is (I assume, last saw it on XP) a notification (confirmation?) box shown before expanding it if it's almost full; this did not appear on the pagefileless W7 box when it was killing apps left and right (if relevant I probably wouldn't have had the rights needed to turn the page file on myself).

    And swap usage will not necessarily slow your computer down severely; a single app and the OS kernel's short term working sets exceeding total system ram will thrash the system into unusability; If you have multiple apps running and they only exceed it collectively you can go over it by a moderate amount (10-25% in my personal experience) before the impact becomes significant. The old towers in my lab at work were suddenly usable again when the swapfile was turned on and they could go to 2.2-2.5 of 2gb of ram used; at the upper end of the range tabbing between apps was maybe a second or two slower than after we scavenged enough DDR2 to get them to 4gb. The same is true of a tablet/netbook running W8 with 2gb of ram; although since the only major app it's running most of the time is a browser it does hit the wall it bit faster/harder. My work laptop doesn't noticeably slow down until I get to about 9.5GB used with 8GB of ram, and it's not until the rare instances where I get to somewhere between 10 and 11gb that the swap becomes more of an issue than having to repeatedly close and reopen several applications to keep memory pressure down. My old personal desktop was able to get to 15/12gb used before it started affecting the general system performance; although the approach to it was probably partially screened by only getting that high when I had multiple 32bit browsers at >3gb each and slowing down due to what I assume was severe heap fragmentation because it happens even when there's plenty of physical ram available and a reload all tabs restart drops its use down to around 1gb.

    Lastly, with ram increasingly soldered on and the cheap computers that your local boxmart sells at 10:1 to the higher end systems we generally use having less than 8gb no swap file and dieing apps (in which case their computer isn't "slow", it's "broken" and the race to the bottom PoS they buy to replace it won't be any better) will be a much worse user experience than if the swap was turned on.

    BB's top 15 windows laptops sorted by best selling include 3 with 2Gb of ram, 4 with 4gb, 4 with 6gb, 3 with 8 gb, and 1 with 16gb. The 6gb tier is relatively new; I didn't see anything with that much a year ago when a family member was in the market for a new laptop I and 4gb was ubiquitous; making the share of computers out there with 8gb or more much smaller and it's not hard to go above 4gb if you're a person who keeps a lot of tabs open at one time in a browser. 2gb is even worse, depending on what I'm doing my low end laptop tops out at 5-10 tabs open if I want it to run reasonably well; and even there the 1st gen atom cpu cores are pushing it to end of life status faster than I'd hoped.
  • Bob Todd - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Yes, I'm sure some anonymous fool on the internet knows more about how Windows handles virtual memory than someone like Mark Russinovich.
  • Gigaplex - Sunday, October 4, 2015 - link

    Agreed
  • zodiacfml - Saturday, October 3, 2015 - link

    Wow, thanks. I didn't know about this as I thought the Compact OS should be done during image creation or during the Windows Upgrade process and I didn't see any documentation for this command.

    I have read somewhere that this OS compression is no different from file compression that this command might even include various levels of compression depending on the system.
  • Wolfpup - Tuesday, October 6, 2015 - link

    Wow, GREAT article! This is something Microsoft should themselves have written and posted somewhere! Really interesting about WIM...sounds like if anything it actually ends up wasting MORE space over time. Really interesting about this compact mode!

    Considering there are a lot of lower end systems/tablets with just 32GB, this could be a huge help, and I'd never heard of it. Should start out with more storage than 8, and then if its not already on, can get more still.
  • aj654987 - Thursday, October 8, 2015 - link

    whenever i buy a new PC/laptop with windows preinstalled, the first thing I do before even starting it up is put in an Acronis usb boot drive and back up an image to an external HD. Then I always have a factory reset available and also if I decide to sell the computer, just wipe the HD and load the original image back on it.

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