Hi,
I recently used Window's recovery option to perform a factory restore, because of diminishing drive space, before upgrading my partner's HP Stream 11 Notebook, from Win8.1 to Win10 1909, using the Media Creation tool.
I am wondering what effect any future factory restore might have, will it restore W8.1 or W10?
Thanks for any heads up.
Factory reset does exactly that- resets the PC to 'as bought' from the shop or factory. Perhaps some 12- 20Gb or so is used to provide that on your disk, so if you never wished to return to Win 8, you could recover the space.
Win 10 builds are always freely downloadable.
There is a useful tutorial to help you manage disk space usage, identify what's using it, and recover space.
Note that after upgrading Windows.old is created on disk- that should be automatically deleted after 10 days by default. (around 20Gb).
When upgrading Windows 8 to 10 it creates a new digital license on Microsoft servers.
This allows easier options for clean install.
A clean install as compared to typical recovery options should install windows with the fewest tagalongs.
Clean Install Windows 10
Also a clean install allows the creation of new reserved storage.
(This is not available with upgrades from 8 to 10)
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/...ge/ba-p/428327
Quote