Formatting a PC

dubmick

I'm thinking of formatting my pc. It's gone quite slow or not as fast as it used to be. It's a P4 3.02ghz with a gig of ram. Think I've had nearly 3 years now and think it is due a fresh start!

Just have to find the original cd's now. I've put all my data and settings on an external hard drive overnight.

Anyway, do you guys do this every now and again, think it's worth it?

Tom Dunne

Not any more.

With OS's pre-XP, yes, but with all the patches and SP2, I don't feel it is worth it any more.

Regular tune-up like defrag, spyware/virus scans, uninstall of old software is really the best way, I think.

irlrobins

Yea used to do it every so often with win98. Haven't had to do it yet on home XP machine.

But if you're in the habit of installing a piece of software, use it for a few days, then uninstalling it and do that a number of times, sometimes it's a good idea to fresh install XP. No matter how good the uninstall programme is, it will always leave files and settings behind.

But as Tom said, defrag, clean up temp files, clean reg, scan for viri etc and u should be ok.

dubmick

Yeah, I usually do all of the above and the pc is in pretty good nick. There has been a lot of software installed and uninstalled on it though.

JoeySully

I generally rebuild my PC at least once a year.
more recently i have installed a sesond HD that stores all my documents and a third disk that stores all my application installation files.

so when i need to do a rebuild i use the xp disk then once that is installed i install all apps from third HD change MY Documents to the second HD and back in action.
generally i have about 25 differnt apps and drivers to install after XP so having them sorted on the HD makes them easier to find and quicker to install. you dont need 3 disks for this you could just partition a disk.

PogMoThoin

I do mine every few mths whether i need 2 or not. gets rid of all the junk. had 2 do it once to get rid of nasty virus & been doin it regularly since. you should only do it if you really think you need 2. its good chance 4 ya 2 learn.

rogue-entity

I have my drive partitioned so that all my personal files are stored seperatly.
I just wipe the C: drive, reinstall XP, fire up Windows Update and let it work away in the background.
Then I just download my Antivirus programme, Firefox and Spybot and install 'em.
When the updates are done I reboot and update Spybot since the AV programme updates after setup. At this point I just install Office and Im ready to go. I install everything else as I need them rather than all at once.

I do find that windows is snappier after a clean install, but I only do a clean install if windows gets badly messed up or a program that I installed fecks up the system.

Bill Andrex

I'd recommend once you have done a fresh install of Windows on your hard drive that you would use program like Norton Ghost to take a snapshot image of your hard drive to save you having to reinstall all your drivers and applications etc

Zapho

I used to rebuild every 4-5 months because I had to deal with the crappiness of win95 to 98 and ME and the way they constantly break. Since I got this new machine running XP I've had no need to rebuild, never had any trouble and its running solidly for 2 years now. But I rebuilt it last week just to remove 2 years worth of junk!

L31mr0d

yeah since building my new PC and started using XP i''ve never needed a fresh install, i think its overrated the pseudo performance gain you feel. Sure its snappier for the first few boots, because peripherals aren't installed yet, and common programs haven't been setup yet. But to get it back to comfortable 127.0.0.1, you're going to do all the updates and reinstall all the little bits of crap you liked using and within a week, BOOM, back where you started.

A good defrag and clean out never hurts the performance. What i'd recommend and I swear by it now is to increase the size of your MFT (Master File Table) when you have first installed the OS before any programs or files have been copied across. XP reserves a ridiculously small ammount of space for this, something like 40MBs, give it something like 500MBs. The MFT resides on the innermost circles of your disk platter as they can be accessed the fastest, and reference every file in your system. If this gets fragmented, your whole system will see a performance hit. When the MFT reachs its limit, it looks for free space where ever there is any, thus fragmented itself, and places table entries further out on the platter surface meaning they are accessed slower, the more you do this the more it fragments, and your defragmenter won't defrag it as it can lead to file references being lost. So its best to reserve more than enough space at a fresh install to avoid the need later.

Diskeeper is an excellent tool for this, it increases the size of your MFT and also has a neat utility that moves files that are accessed the most in your system closer to the inside track of your diskplatter for fastest access.

Run a program like HDtach to monitor the performance of your HDD, and also CCleaner is great for cleaning out old files.

kinaldo

I was about to format the other day for the first time until I realised my Windows XP cd is nowhere to be found

zilog_jones

It doesn't matter which XP CD you use, as long as it's (i) the right type (i.e. home, pro or MCE), (ii) it'll boot on your system (a lot of OEM CD's only work on a particular brand of PCs, e.g. HP Win XP CDs only work on Compaq/HP PCs), and (iii) you're using your own product key of course.