Windows 8 Refresh: A cracking characteristic, if y'all know the limitations

Windows 8 Refresh lets you restore your Windows 8 PC to before country without destroying data, but beware hidden gotchas

In the past few weeks, I've seen many analyses and demos of Windows 8 Refresh, but they all seem to overlook a very of import fact: It ain't perfect. At the risk of sounding overly technical, the fundamental problem is that you can't take your cake and swallow it, too.

Refresh, y'all may recall, is the Windows 8 revitalization process that preserves the user's data and settings but re-installs Windows underneath. (Reset is the other option, which wipes out the PC and returns it to the same land information technology was in when you bought it.) Microsoft advises that Windows viii customers run a Refresh under the same circumstances that Windows 7 users might run a Organisation Restore -- that is, when your arrangement suddenly falls over or starts behaving absurdly.

Organization Restore rolls back Registry settings and some arrangement files to an earlier state. Refresh works completely differently. As Desmond Lee explains in a Edifice Windows 8 Blog, "Refresh functionality is fundamentally still a reinstall of Windows ... merely your data, settings, and Metro mode apps are preserved." When performing a Refresh, your PC boots into Windows Recovery Environment, which sets aside user data, settings, and Metro apps, re-installs Windows, then brings back the user data, settings, and Metro apps.

The actually cool part virtually Refresh is that you can take a snapshot of a system, after all the major legacy apps are installed and configured, and use that snapshot every bit the Refresh baseline. Run a Refresh, feed it the snapshot, and the organisation is restored to its original, pristine country, with all apps -- including legacy apps -- upwards and ready to run, and all user data intact.

We're talking Holy Grail fourth dimension. Just let me show you how it works and explicate why the steak isn't quite as enticing as the sizzle.

If y'all're running the Consumer Preview of Windows 8, you might want to take a few minutes to create a custom refresh point, mash your PC a chip, and run a Refresh to come across what happens. The method's surprisingly unproblematic:

In Windows 8 CP, right-click in the lower-left corner (you know, the place where the Start button should exist) and cull Control Prompt (Admin). You accept to click through a User Account Command message, simply the good former DOS prompt appears, c:\windows\system32:

Next, create a new binder -- something similar:

mkdir c:\refreshpt

Then have Win dows viii create a refresh point using the recimg command. Similar this:

recimg /createimage c:\refreshpt

Windows eight generates a file called install.wim, where "wim" stands for "Windows Installer Image." It takes a while -- more than an hour on a relatively clean machine with a re-create of Office installed, upward to many hours for well-worn systems with lots of data. Yous tin mess effectually with recimg, have it create multiple images, choose among them, then on -- Anandtech has the details.