Sunday, April 19, 2020

How to Reset or Refresh Windows 10 without Losing Programs

Last Updated April 8, 2020

The instruction on this page was last accessed on April 18, 2020. Its content was updated March 3rd, 2020. Given that these instructions are based on the latest versions of Windows, the timeliness of the information is important. The article mentions of Windows 10 builds 15002. This build goes back to year 2017, so it is safe to say that your copy of Windows is newer than this and therefore does not have Refresh Windows in Windows Defender. Therefore, you should look for this refresh feature as Reset this PC in Settings. Remember, the Reset feature will remove all your third party programs whereas the 3 methods below do not.

The 3 methods mentioned in the article are:

Method 1. Do a repair upgrade by running the Windows Setup.exe
Method 2. Create a custom refresh image with all programs for resetting
Method 3. A more convenient method to create custom recovery image

If you prefer to watch how these 3 methods are used, there are videos on Youtube that can visually show them.