My own laptop has broken so I needed to borrow a new one from work. I took a pre-used Microsoft Surface 3. After I had transferred my data and applications it began behaving strangely.

I ran

c:\> sfc /scannow

and found that there were errors. Therefore I decided to reset the Microsoft Surface 3. “Reset” is a feature of Windows 10 that refreshes the operating system and allows you keep your data files intact.

The timing were,

• 0 mins: Start “Reset”
• 65 mins: Resetting is complete and I can login and “Check for updates”
• 1 hr 30 mins: Updates have finished applying
• 2 hr 30 mins: Office 2016 reinstalled from Office 365 source and Outlook Desktop set up
• 3 hr: Other programs installed from network media
• Overnight – all emails downloaded and Outlook indexing complete

It did seem to fix all the problems but it can been seen that “Resetting” the PC is not a cheap option. That is 3 hours of my life that I am not going to get back. It is a big blow that you have to manually reinstall and configure all your applications. It is not just a case of hitting the button and going and getting a beer.

I have not tried the alternative option of removing all my files but I think that the process would take a similar amount of time. This would be a more secure option because other users would be purged from the machine but it would be necessary to copy my user data onto it again from my FileHistory Backup (+ 2hr) and allow OneDrive to sync (+ overnight).