There’s a new ‘Sanitize’ feature on your Chromebook, and here’s what it does

To go along with the basic premise of a factory reset on your Chromebook being referred to as a ‘Powerwash’, Google has gone and added a new feature we’re first seeing in ChromeOS 128 called ‘Sanitize’; and it feels a bit more like a simple cleanup versus the Powerwash’s full-blown wiping of the entire machine. Let’s take a look at where to find it, and see what it does.

Right next to the Powerwash option

This one is new enough that searching your settings for ‘Sanitize’ won’t actually turn up anything. Instead, you need to find your Powerwash option (you can search that one) and right beneath the option to fully wipe, erase, and factory reset your Chromebook, you’ll now see the new choice to Sanitize your Chromebook instead.

There’s not much documentation out there on this just yet, but clicking the button gives us a pretty clear indication of what Google is going after with a Sanitize versus a Power Wash. Check it out:

Pretty clear, right? By using this new Sanitize feature, you’ll be able to keep your files and installed apps all in their place, but your settings will return to safer defaults where you presumably can troubleshoot the issue you may be having. As you can see, your local files, cookies and tabs will all be left alone. This is generally going to clean up your extensions and any settings that those extensions may have changed along the way.

I gave it a try

Being curious to see what would happen and wanting to know in order to tell all of you fine readers, I went ahead and ran a quick Sanitize. After a reset of the desktop, I was met with a new window that showed what was changed and offered up suggestions on things to check up on moving forward.

For a person like me who doesn’t get too tied up with a bunch of extensions, this didn’t really change much. I clicked through some of the suggestions, but most of the post-Sanitize checklist is about looking at your settings a bit closer and making sure things are still up and running the way you expect.

I feel like this is going to be a great first step when users are having issues with their Chromebooks. Instead of forcing a full-blown factory reset (A.K.A. – Powerwash), this is a first step I’ll recommend as the start of troubleshooting. So many times rogue extensions are the root of Chromebook problems, so having a service that not only removes them, but also resets settings they likely should not have changed in the first place will be helpful when a Chromebook is acting up.