I’ve had my Lenovo Yoga 13 since the beginning of April, and I’ve loved it so far. The ultrabook is truly what I need to get both laptop processing power and touch screen capabilities in one device. The Yoga 13 is fairly Sarah-proof in terms of transforming - I haven’t broken the hardware yet! (Yes, I’m a natural klutz and unfortunately hard on hardware.) However, software isn’t Sarah-proof and in the 4 months that I’ve had my Yoga, I’ve managed to find something to anger the wireless gods, which means that I got to the point of having to install my wireless drivers at least once a day. I tried running SFC to fix my wonky system files, and while it used to work, once I got Windows Update KB2821895 then my laptop continued down the spiral loop of crankiness. The endless loop of DISM and SFC was enough for me to raise the white flag and move on.
Why now?
Now that my community college courses are done for a bit, I’m no longer relying as heavily on the laptop. I still have some work with the Software Craftsmanship Guild, but I wasn’t solely relying on the Yoga for that work. After backing up my files, I decided that it was time to wipe it out and start from scratch. Since the Lenovo Yoga 13 has a OneKey Recovery feature, I figured I’d put it to the test.
Starting OneKey Recovery on the Lenovo Yoga 13
While rebooting the laptop, make sure to press the circular, inset button (called the “Novo button”) to the left of the power button. I used a pen to hold it in while rebooting. This will trigger a boot menu that brings up the prompt for doing things such as getting into the BIOS and using the OneKey Recovery system for system backups and system restores. Using the arrow keys, select System Recovery.
Once in the system recovery portion, pay attention to the warnings, as they mean it when they say it will wipe out existing data and restore it to the point you select. While I might have had prior backups of my machine, I wasn’t certain just how far back my drivers really started getting wonky. For my own peace of mind, I chose to restore from day 1, the initial backup. After going through the steps and telling it to go, 6 minutes later, I was back to day 1.
Now Getting Those Apps Back…
Like I said…. my laptop was wiped back to day 1. In 4 months, I’ve installed 74 apps between my 2 Windows 8 laptops. That’s a lot of apps to recover! Thankfully, since my Windows 8 machines are both tied to my Microsoft Account, I can go straight into the Store app and see what programs I need to install. I can select whichever ones I really need on my laptop and then tell them to install.
As for the Non-Apps…
Today will be another 2-laptop day - this one installing all of the tools of the trade, while the other one is used for finishing slide decks and demos. But if I were the average user who used the ultrabook for things that rely on the cloud, I’d be back to fully functioning at this moment. I am quite content with the way the OneKey Recovery reset my machine back to the day that I got it.
Once in the system recovery portion, pay attention to the warnings, as they mean it when they say it will wipe out existing data and restore it to the point you select. While I might have had prior backups of my machine, I wasn’t certain just how far back my drivers really started getting wonky.