How Often To Reinstall Windows

[high_revs]

Phil,
Get a good imaging program. I use acronis. Basically, install the basic OS, and nothing else. Install and run acronis and make an image copy. Why? This basically saves you HOURS from any reinstall in the future because you're restoring from a copy, rather than the whole install, expand compressed files, etc. from the install CD.

Then do it incrementally (or whole image again if you have the spare HDD space) as you install programs. Plan your install and incremental images well. meaning, ones you probably will not upgrade in like 2-3 years, install them first. That way, if you ever upgrade other software like office xp -> office 2009, you can do so w/o going back to step 2 as opposed to step5 if you ever have to restore to a "good" starting point.

As everyone says, it's very easy to bloat the PC. Install this little thing here, this little there and next thing you know, you have so many freaking TSR (terminate and stay resident programs, if that's still the term from the Win2k/win98 days). Minimize all start up programs unless you really need them. Adobe is one that sometimes is notorious of this with all the auto-update software that keeps on polling for new updates from Adobe. Ever have those multiple updates for iTunes and quicktime? That's an easy way to get bloated. And uninstall is never really as easy, even if you hack the registry.

Hope that helps. I avg 1x/yr. 1x/1.5yrs if I'm lucky. Always back up your data too... ALWAYS.

[glockman19]

I agree with others who suggest defrag. You might also look at your RAM and virtual memory settings.

[spetsnaz]

never really. maybe once every 2-3 years if i need to. right now i will be reinstalling windows because of hard drive failure and will upgrade to a larger drive.

[sfwdiy]

Zero once you buy a Mac

You've obviously never seen what an idiot can do to a Mac.

Mild disk corruption is really not uncommon on Macs that have been in use for a while. I'd say a good 85% of the machines I see that are having problems or running slowly have disk errors that crop up when I run fsck -f.

Also, just because fsck fixes the issues with the file system doesn't mean that individual files weren't corrupted, partially overwritten, etc. during the time that the file system was borked.

I do clean installs about once a year on my daily-use machines, or more often if I discover significant drive corruption. It makes a big difference.

I have never used a MAC but i know that MAC users think they are superior to PC users for some reason. i have noticed a bit of snobery from Steve Jobs though. i do however like my iPod which is the only apple product i own and it has issues also. like all products they have their strengths and drawbacks as well.

Having used and troubleshot Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux over the years, it's been my experience that Windows is the least stable of the three by far. Linux and OS X are both pretty solid, especially when running in a server capacity. Years of uptime are not unheard of.

--B