I received a Lenovo Yoga 2 13 for Christmas. It my first properly new system for ages so I'm a bit out of touch. I've just come to do the typical job of removing the bloat-ware, updating driver, updating Windows and it occurs to me: Could I just use the "Remove everything and reinstall Windows" option in 8.1 then install the newest drivers from scratch instead? I think this would be cleaner and probably quicker than uninstalling and updating everything, but I'm a little worried what with it being a brand new expensive thing. Would doing this affect the baked in recovery partition/systems? While I probably won't ever use them, I really don't want to remove/mess with the option to do a proper factory reset yet.
I think if you use Windows 8 reset option, it'll put it back to where you were when you took it out of the box so all the bloatware and crap will be back.
Well, that's annoying. I have Windows 8.1 media, so I guess at some point I can press the Novo button, boot to the USB drive and do a fresh install from there. I suppose as long as I don't mess with the recovery partition the built in recovery options on the boot menu should still work. Then Windows should activate with the embedded key (after using a generic one if necessary).
As lancer points out, the reset option will use whatever recovery image the OEM has set [which they almost certainly will have]... you can tell it not to use that image, but I can't remember how off the top of my head
It seems fairly simple to create your own system refresh image to replace the manufacturer one using Recimg.exe: http://www.howtogeek.com/167831/eve...reating-custom-recovery-images-for-windows-8/ However, the image seems to have to built from the current system state. I can't see any information about replacing the manufacturer to a new-clean windows image. I guess since they install from a system image there has never been a clean image on the system in the first place, so the only way to get a fresh image is to reinstall windows from W8.1 media and then create one. I'm swapping the OS to an M.2 SSD at some point (it's true that once you go SSD it's difficult to go back, even with a "hybrid" drive), so at that point I'll install a nice clean copy of W8.1 from my install USB drive. Hopefully it will go well, but I think now I'm fairly happy about restoring/transferring recovery images/partitions should I want to get back to the bloat-tastic but working factory settings. Actually what I've learnt about restore images will be very handy. With my new install once I've installed drivers and Windows updates I'll replace the system refresh image. Should save a hell of a lot of the time if I want to do a full system refresh again at some point.
I know you have resolved this but i stumbled across this when repairing a W8 laptop recently; If you want to do a fresh install you can use the MS media creation tool for OEM machines, pick the right version and it will pluck the key out of the BIOS and activate during install : )
