3 ms·
Windows has that feature now. It's surprisingly effective, and is smart enough to preserve, for the most part, user files as well. A major reason that CD's st
by ygjb 6y ago
Windows has that feature now. It's surprisingly effective, and is smart enough to preserve, for the most part, user files as well.
A major reason that CD's stopped being used is the straight up lack of optical drives on modern computers. In most cases these days you specifically need to look for a device that includes optical or other physical media that is not USB.
Given the ubiquity of internet access in most markets where computers are sold (even in developing countries), it is very reasonable to expect that even as a last ditch, the user will be able to connect to the internet on a tethered cell phone, and this is reflected by the fact that on consumer OS you can specify that a connection is metered.
- moftz 6y agoThe restore CDs that the OEM included with the computer still had all the crap baked into it. You needed a retail copy of Windows and hopefully someone hadn't ripped the OEM key sticker off the computer.
- selfhoster11 6y agoThe OEM key would be usually encoded into the BIOS on newer releases of Windows, and could be read from a working Windows install using a freeware utility. In practice, it was unlikely you'd have to reinstall on a freshly wiped PC that you don't have an OEM key for.
- iso1631 6y agoI'm talking 20 years ago, when the average windows machine was a bugladen mess of crap piled on by the OEM because they got paid a bit, and the only "restore cd" was an OEM disk which had all the crap. A proper windows CD would have allowed people to wipe all that out and just have vanilla windows. Microsoft weren't interested in that.