Most painless way to reinstall win 10

For background visit 1903 installation defective

I'm seriously considering reinstalling Win 10 1903 from scratch, given the quirks I've encountered so far. I keep all program info and startups as well as most standard directories in a single large directory called "All". This is incrementally backed up weekly to an external hard disk and I keep monthly copies for a year or so. But I can't back up the Program Files directories and it wouldn't help if I did. I also keep weekly Macrium recovery on a USB flash drive.

Still, it's a daunting project to reinstall everything and bring the system to the way it is now. So my question is, what can I do to make this as easy as possible?

Tried that already -- twice. No luck. As I said, I need to install Win 10 1903 "from scratch".

The most painless way is to do a clean install from a USB flash drive created with the MS Media Creation Tool:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10
Clean Install Windows 10

Full re-installation is a real pain if you have many installed programs. The best remedy is to make frequent system backups - many use Macrium Reflect Free. I have Reflect system backups going back 6 months plus an archived backup I made about 3 years ago when I first fully configured Windows 10.

You will need to do a full reinstall if you don't have a backup to recover from. I recommend doing the following before a clean install:

1. Obviously backup or copy all user files for all accounts
2. Export any VMs you have been using
3. Use a program like Belarc Advisor to record all installed programs and licences
4. Ensure you have all required licence keys
5. Ensure you have all the installation disks or installation files for your programs
6. Copy the configuration data for your more complex programs e.g. Adobe Lightroom. These are usually stored in C:\Users\myname\AppData but not always so
7. Copy your desktop folder to help configure your new desktop
8. Ensure you have backups of your contacts, browser favorites, mail configuration settings etc

Use the media creation tool for a clean install - see Clean Install Windows 10. When you have clean installed and configured Windows 10 I would make and archive a system backup of that configuration.

OK, folks. Thanks for the feedback. As I said, I do use Macrium Reflect. I agree that the Media Creation Tool is the way to install the OS, but the "painless" part I'm looking for is the re-install of all that software.