If you’d rather retain your third-party apps, you can. Refresh can use a recovery image to rebuild a Win8 system to a specific configuration — one that includes third-party apps.
Some PCs come with a manufacturer’s recovery image installed on the hard drive or on DVD. Refresh can use that image to restore both the OS and the manufacturer’s software and drivers.
Better yet, Refresh can use custom system images created with recimg.exe, a command-line tool unique to Win8 (see MS Support article 2748351 for more info). If the custom image you created included third-party apps, Win8 will restore those apps as part of the refresh process.
I’ll cover recimg.exe and custom system images more fully in an upcoming article. For now, let’s complete our walk-through.
