Windows has that feature now. It's surprisingly effective, and is smart enough to preserve, for the most part, user files as well.

A major reason that CD's stopped being used is the straight up lack of optical drives on modern computers. In most cases these days you specifically need to look for a device that includes optical or other physical media that is not USB.

Given the ubiquity of internet access in most markets where computers are sold (even in developing countries), it is very reasonable to expect that even as a last ditch, the user will be able to connect to the internet on a tethered cell phone, and this is reflected by the fact that on consumer OS you can specify that a connection is metered.

The restore CDs that the OEM included with the computer still had all the crap baked into it. You needed a retail copy of Windows and hopefully someone hadn't ripped the OEM key sticker off the computer.

The OEM key would be usually encoded into the BIOS on newer releases of Windows, and could be read from a working Windows install using a freeware utility. In practice, it was unlikely you'd have to reinstall on a freshly wiped PC that you don't have an OEM key for.

I'm talking 20 years ago, when the average windows machine was a bugladen mess of crap piled on by the OEM because they got paid a bit, and the only "restore cd" was an OEM disk which had all the crap.

A proper windows CD would have allowed people to wipe all that out and just have vanilla windows. Microsoft weren't interested in that.

My father asked me to “fix his laptop”, I looked at it and wasn’t able to tell if it was windows 10 or 8 or Vista. It has become some strange hybrid somehow with telling different things in the different parts of the OS. Also the styling would be different at the different parts of the OS(The windows menu looks like 10 but the window decorations are like Vista etc.). He had some professional software that wants to keep so I didn’t dare to do a fresh install or clean up, left it as is. He is still using it just like that.

I think he's running with DWM turned off: https://superuser.com/questions/1016170/temporarily-disable-...

Because you want the drivers and hardware quirk fixes that the oem included, just not the bloatware/malware that they were paid to include.

Not all hardware is as friendly as Linux on a Thinkpad... Sometimes a clean install would leave you without a display, or would put some bizarre peripheral in an unusable state.

Why wouldn't the OS manufacturer bundle required drivers?

A big green 'Accept Windows Defaults' button on the first boot that bricks the computer would be a pretty big incentive for vendors to sort out their drivers.

But they wouldn't sort out their drivers. They'd just tell the user not to click it.

I could be wrong because, like you, I haven't used Windows in quite some time (jumped ship when Windows 8 came along and never used it), but I think Windows 10 does include some sort of clean install/reset setting.