WIndows 10 in a Flash

I experienced a series of laptop disasters, exactly when I'm completely overloaded with finalizing the design documents for (the most) important IoT standard. Murphy's law... First I happened to spill some tea on the lid but the machine kept working, so did I. It lasted for 15 minutes and then gave up the ghost. In a hurry, to continue my (almost) uninterrupted work I hijacked my co-worker's machine (identical model of Lenovo Yoga) put my hard disk in and kept on going. Unfortunately the hijacked machine was in a poor shape: very noisy fan and some broken internals. I managed to rebuild it using the parts of the dead one and thought the problem was over. The rebuild process involved swapping the motherboard and also swapping the touch-pad, so it cost me almost a day.

The following week I found the hard drive gave up the ghost too: "SATA device not recognized" greeted me last Thursday morning exactly 3 hours before a planned train trip. Desperately looking for a backup machine I grabbed my son's MacBook he had not been using too much. It was password - protected so I went the Command-Option-R route to reinstall the OS X. It announced it would take 11 hours to complete. In final desperation I grabbed an old 2.5" spinning disk from a long forgotten box and plugged it in. The machine booted with Windows 7 and Office 2010. Not bad to keep working on a train trip.

After boarding the train, I started downloading the overdue Windows 7 hotfixes. All 187 of them (the hard disk had not been used since 2014). It took 28 hours to complete the operation. After which the drive died, so I could not boot Windows anymore nor the repair utility was of any help.

Not to mention moving back to the era of spinning disks required an ultimate level of patience.

On the next day, back in the office, I downloaded a Windows 10 installation image in preparation to rebuild the new SSD drive. Using the Rufus tool I prepared a bootable USB-3 pendrive with the Windows 10 install. Plugged the pendrive and it took the machine an amazing 7 minutes to do a complete Windows 10 setup. Straight from a cold boot. I-could-not-believe-my-eyes. Then next 10 minutes to download and install the Office 2016 from the onmicrosoft.com cloud. It restored all settings, including wallpapers, folder behaviors, toolbar positions, even my Word styles gallery came configured the way I left it before the crash. Am-ma-zing!

So finally, finally, finally it looks like Microsoft has started putting Cloud to work. With the help of incredible speeds of flash storage, setting a new machine becomes a snap. Seems like the last thing Windows lacks now is a simple tool for disk cloning. Thankfully some high quality tools like the Macrium Reflect do the job and are available for free.