WIll My Steam Library Survive A Refresh & Other Questions.

[EpicSOB]

TL;DR i want to refresh my PC because it running like a drunk sloth. Will i need to re-download my steam games? Will window try and load the original drivers for mobo or for current mobo? is there any other potential issues on refreshing a custom built PC?

 

Okay, my PC is running like shite. its a mostly custom built machine at this point having almost every component replaced save for the HDD, 2 of the ram sticks, some wires, and the case. i intended to refresh the windows 10, tomorrow. my primary concern is rather i will need to re download the over 1.5 tb of games as that will take a week to do, F*** USA internet, and would be very annoying. i had intended to do a refresh at the end of February anyway when i jump to a new hardware tier but it needs to be done now because my PC is borderline unusable in its current state due to the sheer amount of crap that i have on it. 

 

My second issue is I've never done a refresh on a non OEM PC and i don't know if there are any potential issues i need to be concerned with. will it use generic drivers for the main components or will it try to use the drivers from the original parts? if the former what drivers are most important to get first? 

 

NOTE: its 2:34 am for me please forgive any errors in the text i am to tired to fix them now and will fix the bad ones or answer questions and clarifications tomorrow.

[Jumballi]

unless you make a back up orthe few files you can move to a portable drive/usb, all your data is gone. and no moving an exe onto a usb and then back onto a pc doesn't work.

generally though a refresh is to clear up the clutter from broken updates and the like that you build up over time and reinstalling from scratch

 

[Sakkura]

What do you mean by refresh? Which parts are you replacing?

[EpicSOB]

10 hours ago, Sakkura said:

What do you mean by refresh? Which parts are you replacing?

i'm doing a software refresh of windows, the "keep my files"  option of a factory reset. atm i'm not replacing any parts, not until the end of February, at which point the Mobo, ram, & cpu are all being replaced. 

10 hours ago, Cvet76 said:

Before doing anything that risks your files being deleted it's important that you:

1. Understand what you're doing and what is actually being done,

and

2. Make a backup anyway.

Read this:

https://www.techspot.com/article/1671-windows-reset-keep-your-files/

 

 

Are your games all installed on the same drive as the system? If so, why? If you have Steam games you can move them and find them again through the client later. It should restore them and just download the missing binaries and registry settings. Just make sure you have cloud saves enabled inside Steam itself so you don't lose progress.

 

Side note and personal opinion: If you're not playing the 1.5TB of games all the time or even often, it makes no sense to worry about downloading all of them at once. But I don't know you, so take this however you want.

Doesn't matter if it's OEM or not. While OEM systems sometimes have proprietary recovery built in, this isn't relevant with windows system refresh.
All Windows refresh does is set windows up everything to default as it was the day you first installed it. This is a generalization, since I don't want to go into details about what's actually being done during a refresh, but that's basically what's going on.

on average i hit a download speed of 14.3 MB/s on steam and i have an absurd amount of storage space so i just keep games installed on one of my hard drives and shuffle them to the c drive if when i want to play them if they need to be on a faster drive. 

 

10 hours ago, Jumballi said:

unless you make a back up orthe few files you can move to a portable drive/usb, all your data is gone. and no moving an exe onto a usb and then back onto a pc doesn't work.

generally though a refresh is to clear up the clutter from broken updates and the like that you build up over time and reinstalling from scratch

 

the amount of clutter software i have is ridiculous and i dont remember what half of it does or if i need it anymore. i have had at least 20 windows updated including multiple preview builds since this system was setup as well as a significant hardware refresh.