Reinstall of OS - How often?

EireEV

Hi,

How often should you format you hard drive and reinstall your OS?

Is the performance of your PC affected by not doing they above at set intervals?

Thanks.

EireEV

aidan_walsh

EireEV wrote:

How often should you format you hard drive and reinstall your OS?

As a last resort, IMO. Some people like to do it once a year, however.

unnameduser

Echos above. With proper maintenance and protection, regular reinstallations are not required. Its takes a considerable amount of time to reinstall the O.S, updates and drivers along with additional software such as AV, firefox etc etc.

is_that_so

Yep agreed , very time-consuming although a reinstall can give an older machine a new lease of life.

leeroybrown

Whenever I have to use Windows (which I normally don't) I tend to make a clean install, update it and add any applications I need. Then I make a backup of that install that so that I can quickly revert to a clean copy with as little work as possible. This reduces the workload required by a lot.

Zascar

I do it every 6 months. If you are prepared it only takes a couple of hours. I have my drive partitioned so I don't need to backup, I just wipe, reinstall my programs and change settings etc. Definitely worth doing when your pc gets slow

watty

Never, if it is properly set up.

I have an old WFWG 3.11 last installed in 1993 or 1994
(I used it till 1996 when I got NT4.0, since then occasionally for the CDi player and MJPEG frame server video hardware)

My XP laptop never re-installed from new in April 2002.

Better to learn WHY the PC has gone slow and fix it.

A few months ago I even upgraded the harddive from 30G to 120G without any re-install, though MS office wanted re-activated.

I've only re-installed (wiped) on Windows or Linux if I was installing a newer OS on same machine. "Upgrades" generally are poorer than clean installs.

I've recovered "broken" servers and workstations by "sideways" install into a different named Windows Directory on same partition. And reset lost passwords by booting from "magic" CD to avoid a reinstall for folks.

Static M.e.

Dont really do "Reinstall" but I do image my pc every 6 months or so even if its not broken or damaged.

I do alot of screwing around on my pc and test alot of software so I find it easier just to reimage.

It only takes me a few minutes to reimage the pc back to a working state, I literally just make a cup of coffee and its done. Update AV \ Patch and away I go.

Stephen

I used to reinstall XP every six months or so, trying to improve meagre framerates in games . I've had Vista since its release without reinstalling yet though.

Balfa

Yeah, I used to reinstall windows every 6 months or so, but stopped doing that after migrating to XP. I don't know if it's the OS or if my habits for tinkering with software have changed, but I find it much better than any prior MS OS, even 2000.