Windows 8 reinstall likened to a neutron bomb

Microsoft's Windows 8 is making lots of positive noises to the market. Everything for everyone, it seems. Can Bill Gates' legacy manage to produce a better, faster, cheaper, lighter operating system that can match Apple's locked-down fascism on everything from mobile phones to tablets and desktops? KitGuru places a door against the wall with 15 bottles of water underneath, and waits for the Rick O'Shea.

In the paranoia that surrounded the Cold War between American and Russia, lots of focus was given to the idea of ‘selective nuclear weapons'. These so called ‘neutron bombs', were supposed to offer relatively low explosive power – coupled with high dose radiation release. The idea was to kill the people, while leaving the buildings intact. Sort of a ‘greener way to wage war'. Sort of.

So what is the Microsoft ‘Restart and Refresh' all about?

Well, for years, the reinstall process for Microsoft has seemed completely nuts. While the iPad move to iOS5 was as simple as pointing your tablet to the right web site – then going off to do something else while the world was made good (and not a single app or block of valuable data was destroyed)… Microsoft's own method has, over the past 20 years, tended to be more like cleaning your living room with a flame thrower.

Now, Jobs-inspired OS engineers at Microsoft have decided that an operating system COULD be re-installed without destroying the world and everything in it. Geniuses these chaps.

A bog-style article by Steven Sinofsky and Desmond Lee seems to show exactly how Windows 8 will be offering its neutron bomb reinstall capabilities.

These Microsoft experts say that the coolest thing about the Apple-style Refresh is that “…there’s no need to first back up your data to an external hard drive and restore them afterwards”.

Using a really fast PC, Microsoft claim that the refresh process will take less than 9 minutes, which isn't bad.

KitGuru says: Now that Microsoft has borrowed the tablet interface and operating system update concepts from Apple, we're wondering what will come next? If you asked the market, the one area where help is needed is the price of the OS. With something called OS X Lion available for just over £20 from the Apple web site, Microsoft looks sadly out of touch charging us around £80 for Home Premium.

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