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- HP Community
- Notebooks
- Notebook Operating System and Recovery
- hp notebook stream

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08-29-2020 09:18 AM
Somehow, the Factory Reset has taken on the value of an Urban Legend that is a Miracle Cure for any ailing PC. Not only does it rarely fix the PC, if there is an underlying hardware issue with the PC, it will make matters WORSE by leaving the PC in an unusable state.
Even if there is NOT an underlying hardware issue, the reset puts Windows back to where it was weeks or months ago -- and this will then automatically launch hours or days of Windows Udpates that will bring your PC to a grinding halt, driving the processor up to 100% and the disk utilization to 100% as well. Both of these do NOTHING to speed up the PC.
The HP Factory Reset function relies critically on the contents of the Recovery partition being intact. If those contents get corrupted, which can happen either due to hard drive failing or due to Win10 Upgrade from an older OS, the reset simply will not work -- and will TRASH the PC in the process.
So, you go from having a SLOW PC, to having NO PC. That's not an improvement.
The Stream models have insufficient "disk space" to do built-in factory recoveries successfully. It may appear to have worked, but when you try to use it, you will find out it did not.
If your PC is a 2016 model or newer, you should see if you can make a bootable USB recovery drive using the HP cloud recovery tool on a working PC.
The recovery drive can then be used to install Win10 and the HP drivers and utilities that originally came with your PC.
Here is the link: https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c06162205
You will need to use the HP Cloud Recovery option to download and create your own HP recovery media.
I am a volunteer and I do not work for, nor represent, HP