We are also redesigning Windows’ Refresh and Reset functionalities to no longer use a separate recovery image (often preinstalled by manufacturers today) in order to bring Windows devices back to a pristine state.
What Microsoft is trying to say here is that while they will still allow manufacturers like Dell and HP to pre-install a pile of crappy bloat/ad/malware, they will finally give you the ability to do a clean recovery of only Windows 10. As an added bonus, you can apparently create your own recovery partition with updates already applied. Nice!
I’ll not be switching to Windows any time soon, but this was one major reason I wouldn’t even consider it. Unfortunately, even when Microsoft does something really great, they manage to screw it up.
I realize that MS makes its money licensing copies of Windows to OEMs, and they are the ones that screw the users directly But it ultimately hurts MS more than anyone, because the remedy is not buy another PC manufacturer’s piece of hardware, but using another OS entirely. It screws the user because in order to have a great Windows experience, you first have to have a horrible one.
Microsoft has done a lot of things to copy Apple over the years, but putting the user first has never been one of those things.
It’s not often that I get a password protected PDF file that I don’t get the password for. I’m not talking about a restricted PDF that doesn’t allow you to print or copy text out of, those are easy to work around. I’m referring to the obnoxious graphic artist at Client X who no longer works there who set the security settings on an important PDF to require a password just to open. That guy is a jerk, but that’s for another time. How to get into the PDF is the immediate dilemma we need to deal with.