According to a blog post at MSDN Windows 8 will offer many ways to restore or refresh your computer, something that has long been lacking for everyone from the hardcore geek to the casual user: [thumbleft=14] Today, there are many different approaches and tools to get a PC back to factory condition. If you buy a PC with Windows preinstalled, it often comes with a manufacturer-provided tool and a hidden partition that can be used for that specific model of PC. You might also use a third-party imaging product, Windows system image backup, or the tried and true method of a clean reinstall from the Windows DVD. While these tools all provide similar functionalities, they don’t provide a consistent experience from one PC or technique to another. If you are the “go to” person for your friends, relatives, or neighbors when they need help with their PCs, you may find that it’s sometimes necessary to just start over and reinstall everything. Without a consistent experience to do this, you might end up spending more time finding the recovery tool for a specific PC than actually fixing the problems, and this gets even worse if you’re helping someone over the phone.

With Windows 8, there are a few key things that we set out to deliver:
• Provide a consistent experience to get the software on any Windows 8 PC back to a good and predictable state.
• Streamline the process so that getting a PC back to a good state with all the things customers care about can be done quickly instead of taking up the whole day.
• Make sure that customers don’t lose their data in the process.
• Provide a fully customizable approach for technical enthusiasts to do things their own way.

The blog post goes into further detail on how you can refresh, reset, restore apps, troubleshoot and more with screenshots of these functions.