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How often do you reinstall Windows?

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superboyac:
It's getting to the time where I'm thinking of reinstalling Windows XP.  I've been having problems with my system tray, and the latest version of Kaspersky was turned off for a few days because I felt it was slowing down my computer, and I think I got a virus (even though kasperksy has now cleaned it).  Also, my exe file association is broken, so I can't run any exe files until I fix it.
And it's been several years since I last installed Windows, I figure it's as good a time as any.  But I swear, since joining DC, I've installed so many programs on this computer, it's ridiculous!  It will take me a while to reinstall everything.

PPLandry:
My Acer Travelmate 660 notebook is now 4.5 years old and still on the original XP installation. System restore did rescue it a few times  :Thmbsup:.

In Win98 days, you could simply re-install Windows without erasing your HD and re-installing all software. It refreshed the OS and often (not always) did fix it. I would try to do this first (but I'm no OS expert, perhaps even do it with XP SP3 which I read is pretty stable).

I fear of day I'll need to change PC: Re-install/configure everything = 1 week of non-productive work, plus months of tuning/tweaking everything...

Deozaan:
I usually do it about once a year, but now that I think about it I think that's because I usually upgraded something that often. Something like a new hard drive, where I wanted to reorganize everything.

Sometimes, though, on my secondary computer (this one I'm typing on actually, since I can't get my primary computer to start) when it gets filled with crap I just format and reinstall. But I think it was late 2006 since I last did it on this machine.

@PPLandry: System Restore does stuff for you? Any time I try to restore to a restore point, it takes forever to reboot and it just tells me that it was unsuccessful. System Restore has always been worthless to me because it always tells me after the fact of doing it that it couldn't do it.

mrainey:
Never.  I make an image backup once a week, takes twenty minutes .  Maybe five times in the past six years I've had to use one of them to restore.  I copy important work to a thumb drive in between backups.  I use JV16, very carefully, to keep track of things in the registry.

My XP installation seems to run as fast as ever.

PPLandry:
@PPLandry: System Restore does stuff for you? Any time I try to restore to a restore point, it takes forever to reboot and it just tells me that it was unsuccessful. System Restore has always been worthless to me because it always tells me after the fact of doing it that it couldn't do it.
-Deozaan (March 28, 2008, 04:06 PM)
--- End quote ---
Works fine and is speedy. But then again, I work on a notebook, nothing ever changes...

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