Resetting Windows 10 Pro question

garlin said:

Unless it's like a newer Intel VMD drive controller, a lot of the generic drivers will work as decent substitutes until you install a replacement driver. What type of drivers are you re-installing? Are they boot-critical devices like a disk controller, or less critical devices like a network or graphics driver?

Boot-critical drivers are hard to replace on a live system.

Audio, video, ethernet, wireless, card reader, those types of things.

I especially want to reset my ethernet connection since I think malware kept turning my machine on, despite me turning off any BIOS settings, sleep power settings and wake-on-lan settings and doing empty malware scans that turn up nothing.

I've never done a reset before. It seems to avoid having to do a clean install and fumbling around for a product key, which may or may not work.

dalchina said:

But you could simply reinstall them manually if you can get the relevant ones downloaded e.g. from your manufacturer's site.

Yup, I got those.

Seems like you feel you have some underlying issues but are not sure of their origin.

Oh definitely. Good thing I don't use this laptop very much, so I didn't have a lot to lose.

I should've probably done it this way instead of doing an inplace upgrade from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. I've always had different problems with it since then, so it'll be worth it to rebuild it and eventually do backups of it. I want to keep this machine for at least a couple more years and I may attempt to do a workaround to get Windows 11 on it, eventually. See what I can get away with, there.

Well went ahead and did it. Looks pretty clean, too. Malware, gone! 👍 🙂