Sometimes in the course of using your Windows computer, it gets so messed up that it’s unusable. Maybe a Windows update corrupted it, a severe virus infection can’t be cured, or something unknown happened and Windows won’t start. In these cases, some computer manufacturers provide a way to roll-back to the day you got the computer new.  It’s called Factory restore or sometimes system restore. In the past, you would get restore media on CDs or DVDs that you could boot from and your Windows operating system, hardware drivers and other software would be re-installed.  It does overwrite your user data in some cases.  I have seen non-destructive factory restore options which saves your data.   Nowadays, computer manufacturers don’t provide media – they have a restore partition on the hard drive.  You access the factory restore which a special keyboard combination of one or two keys.  In my experiences, it was better when you had disks available to restore to factory specs.  If the factory restore is on the hard drive and the hard drive has problems, factory restore may not work.  Then you hope you can ask the computer company for real restore media on disks to get your computer back to normal.  In the last week or so I have had computer repair jobs where I tried to restore from the partition with the special key combination and they didn’t work.  In one of the cases , the company did not have restore media at all and we couldn’t go back. 

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