Suppose you’ve bought a computer with Windows 10 preinstalled. The operating system itself isn’t a problem, but it’s the satellite junk that comes with it that drives you crazy.
Using tools like PC Decrapfier is easy, and there’s always the manual route of nuking partitions from orbit, but we shouldn’t forget that Microsoft offers its own Windows 10 Refresh Tool for assisted clean installs.
The Bloatware Problem
Bloatware is an enemy that has reached every generation of users. Just turn on a smartphone or a tablet to see that we don’t need half the crap preinstalled on those devices, and the situation is even worse on computers. Who in their right mind would be happy with a trial antivirus devouring half a gigabyte of RAM in the background? And let’s not talk about some trial editions of Office that seem riveted to the hard drives. Bloatware is mainly a business matter, but the only loser is the user. The supposed “savings” from getting the system become a loss of time purging all that garbage.
Windows 10 offers an internal reset mechanism, but there’s a catch: it depends on the “recovery image” that new computers usually store on a secondary partition (it will rain for six months the day Microsoft ships DVDs or USB drives with its OEM licenses again). That image already contains all the factory bloatware, so bringing it back makes no sense.
This is when advanced users resort to the so-called “nuclear option”, also known as “Lieutenant Ripley’s philosophy”, which translates to blowing up all partitions and starting from scratch with a freshly downloaded Windows image. The Redmond giant actually provides an external tool to assist with that process, called Windows 10 Refresh Tool. It’s very small—less than 400 kilobytes—but unlike Windows 10’s internal reset, it downloads an image from Microsoft’s servers (3 GB on average). As the text indicates, that image won’t have anything related to your computer, from preinstalled bloatware to drivers, which you’ll have to download again (unless Windows Update has them).
The process can be destructive (the usual in these cases), but there’s also the option to tell Windows to protect your personal files. The text doesn’t specify what section of your data Microsoft considers “personal”, but I’d guess it will keep user profiles intact. The bloatware isn’t going anywhere, but it’s a positive sign that it’s recognized as a problem, and that official channels offer tools to fight it.
