Refresh or reset a Windows 10 PC

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Having a demo PC on loan from Microsoft at the moment, means that, from time to time, I want to undo some of the changes I’ve made and restore default settings. This is where the ability to refresh or reset a Windows 10 PC comes in.

PC Refresh and Reset have been Windows features since Windows 8, but it’s the first time I’ve used them.  The intention is that a refresh reinstalls Windows whilst retaining data, applications and settings. A reset restores the PC to the out of the box settings.

Unfortunately, attempting a reset from my Windows 10 installation media didn’t help much, resulting in a “There was a problem while resetting your PC” message.

The resolution was to instigate the reset from within Windows (Settings., Update and Security, Recovery, Reset this PC), rather than from “Repair my computer” in Windows Setup.

Windows 10 - Update and Security - Recovery

The PC will reboot and a progress screen (similar to at Windows startup) will show “Resetting this PC” and the percentage complete. Then , the next phase is “Installing Windows”. After this, select regional settings, accept the legal agreement, customise settings and wait for setup to complete (including critical updates).

Within half an hour or so, I’d reset the PC to its initial state and was able to start work again, knowing that my previous “fiddling” and application installations would no longer interfere with my work.

Windows 10 licence activation – make sure you use the correct installation media

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Yesterday, I wrote about the SSD upgrade I carried out for my family’s PC. The PC was originally supplied with a Windows 8 OEM licence, upgraded to 8.1, then to 10 and was correctly licenced and activated. Everything I’d read suggested that, as the machine signature was registered with Microsoft, changing the hard drive shouldn’t affect the licensing situation and it should activate after a clean install (skipping the opportunity to enter a product key during installation). For that reason, I was a little alarmed when it didn’t work.

Windows 10 was installed, but activation failed, and it seemed the only option was to go to the Store and pay almost two-hundred pounds for a copy of Windows 10 Pro. That got me thinking… “Pro” – but this was a Windows 8.1 PC (not 8.1 Pro)…

I then downloaded the correct media (Windows 10 Home), reinstalled, and it activated automatically with no problems at all. So, the moral of that little story is to make sure that you install Windows using the correct media, in order for Windows 10 licence activation to work.

Just to be clear, you can only install Windows 10 cleanly from media if the PC has previously been upgraded from a qualifying operating system (or if you purchased a Windows 10 licence). The version you will get is covered in Microsoft’s Windows 10 FAQ:

Unable to boot from USB flash drive on a Lenovo PC (to install Windows 10)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Yesterday, I wrote about not having to wait for Windows 10 to be advertised to my PCs and downloading the software directly instead. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out to be quite that simple.

Overnight, both the Windows 8.1 PCs in our house decided that Windows 10 was ready (I clearly need to be more patient) but my 10 year-old son wanted to perform the upgrade (he’s a trainee geek) so, I waited for him to come home tonight before we tried it out. Because I’d already downloaded the media I thought I could skip bringing almost 3GB down over my ADSL line and boot from USB but we had a little trouble along the way…

I’d prepared a USB flash drive from the Windows 10 .ISO file using Rufus but our family PC (a Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 15) didn’t want to boot from it.

First of all, I had to work out the boot menu key combination (F12) but, even then, the boot menu only wanted to boot from the network, or from the local hard drive. I checked the BIOS (F1 at boot) and USB boot was enabled. Following Lenovo support article HT076906 (How to enter Setup Utility (F1) or Boot Menu (F12) on a Microsoft Windows 8/8.1 preloaded PC), I tried various combinations to reboot the machine (including Shift+Shutdown for a full shutdown and Shift+Restart for Windows boot options) but nothing was helping to boot from USB.

I tried recreating my media using different partition schemes for UEFI but that didn’t work either. So I followed Lenovo support article HT078684 (Cannot Boot From a USB Key – Idea Notebooks/Desktops) to:

  1. Run cmd.exe with Administrator privileges.
  2. Insert the target USB boot media device into an available USB port.
  3. Type:
    diskpart
    list disk (and make note of the disk number of the target USB drive)
    select disk n (where n is the target USB drive noted earlier)
    clean
    create partition primary
    format fs=fat32 quick
    active
    assign
    list volume
    exit
  4. Copy the entire contents of the Windows ISO onto the newly created UEFI boot media.

After this, I successfully restarted the PC, using F12 to access the boot menu and could boot from USB (i.e. the flash drive was available in the menu).

Unfortunately, after all that effort, Windows 10 wanted a product key to install (which I didn’t think I had on a PC that came with Windows pre-installed), so I went back to an in-place upgrade using Windows Update.

Installing Windows 10 via Windows Update

It’s been a few years since I regularly built PCs and it seems my desktop skills are a little rusty… since then, I’ve discovered a number of utilities for reading the product key of my Windows installation (which is also stored in the BIOS) – the tool I used is Windows Product Key Finder, available for download from CodePlex.

Short takes: Windows 10 download location; btvstack.exe and Skype

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 9 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Some more mini-posts glued together as a “short take”…

Windows 10 download location – no need to wait for a notification

As a “Windows Insider” (yeah, right, me and several million others…) I’ve been patiently waiting for the notification icon on my Family PC to tell me that Windows 10 is ready for me to download and install.  I didn’t expect it immediately on July 29th – anyway, I was on holiday last week so I could wait a few days – but I did hope I’d get it over the weekend (especially as I had a new PC to set up for my wife… more on that in a future post).

Well, after tweeting my frustration, I received multiple replies asking me why I didn’t download it directly. It seems you don’t need to wait for a notification icon, just download from the Microsoft website (either for a direct update, or to create media for other PCs). Just take note that this will not work for enterprise editions.

Incidentally (and thanks to Garry Martin for this tip), Rufus is a handy app for creating USB media from an .ISO image.

btvstack.exe wants to use Skype

When I launched Skype yesterday, it told me that btvstack.exe wants to use Skype and presented two options – allow or deny access. How do I know which to chose? What is btvstack.exe? Is it a piece of malware that will start running up huge Skype bills for me? Should I allow it.

Well, Rob Schmuecker (@robschmuecker) has already done the legwork and written a post that tells us “What is BtvStack.exe and why is Skype asking me to allow it?“. If the Skype developers were being a little less cryptic they might have said “Skype wants to use your computer’s Bluetooth radio to connect to a device – is that OK?”. You probably don’t need to allow access but if you use a Bluetooth headset, then maybe you will…