How often do you format?

How often do you wipe off, and get that nice feeling of starting again.

 

actually i usually format about once a month

 

How about "never"? Why don't you have a "rarely if ever" option? Reformatting should barely be necessary on a well-maintained system.

As an aside, at my old job, the CEO's Windows directory was named "WINNT35". And he was on Win2K. He had upgraded (rather, had me and another guy upgrade it) through the years, NEVER reinstalling. Stick THAT in your pipe and smoke it

 

Generally once a year, its just good getting all the crap off of it every now that accumulates from uninstalled programs. I could probably go longer as I regularly use CCleaner, AdAware, Defrag, and always have a firewall and AV program running.

 

Every so often I'll reload my Ghost image, never really format just keep that ghost image around and use it.

Works great, never really run into issues.

 

I find myself reformatting less and less as I go along. Just living by the mantra of "don't install tons of crap" keeps my computer running smoothly these days.

The last reformat I've done was of a family member's computer, that was probably a member of about twenty million botnets, and was rendered completely nonfunctional by the tons of adware and malware that was on it.

Pita, if the difference between the NT iterations between 3.5 and whichever 2k was was anything like that between xp and vista, the thought terrifies me.

 

Perhaps. However, I'm sure most of us in this forum have a unique PC, on which we do everything. Installing and uninstalling applications, that we though would work but didn't (Improver's), or applications that we don't use anymore (Renewer's). Surf on dangerous places (Adventurers), try beta applications (Solidaries) or erase parts of Windows that we don't like (Rebels).
For us, is unavoidable to figure that a good format is better that many other repairs, at least every two years.
Still, the option "every two years" has very few votes, so I guess the ones that "never do" are a minority.

 

well...i would only want to reformat if i really have to. recently i did a fresh nice clean install of windows xp and gawwwsh it's running of course wayy faster than before knowing that i know whats running and whats not. the fact that i can use only a lil bit of resources. this is also after installing all my main programs that i love to use. (adobe photoshop cs2 , mediaplayer 11, windows live messenger, iExploer7, windows defender...) and it runs nice and smooth. oh yea, btw, reason why i recently did this was due to some windows vista testing....wanted my ol' xp back

 

More so than XP->Vista. Windows NT 3.5 was the first version of Windows not based on DOS, but rather on a VMS-like architecture. It was first released in 1994. Then you had NT4 which was released in '96. Then Windows 2000, which was release in (you guessed it) 2000. He actually finally upgraded to 2K in around 2004, so basically he was running an approximately 10 year old install of Windows that had been upgraded many times. He likes having "progman.exe" in his startup list. Still. On Windows 2000. For those of you who don't know, progman was the interface for Windows 3.1. It was replaced with explorer.exe with Windows 95.

Just an FYI: Windows 2000 = NT5.0, Windows XP = NT5.1, Windows Vista = NT6.0
So he's basically gone MANY more steps of NT than XP->Vista.

 

The mind boggles. I'm thinking of all the stuff that blew up on those unfortunate users who had some bad software juice and tried to upgrade to XP SP2 from SP1. (To say nothing of hardware.) I guess it's just a sign of knowledgable system administration, but still, that's impressive.

I knew the versioning was something like that. Progman. That's awesome.

 

Once or twice a month =)

 

Whenever the free subscription on Norton Antivirus runs out, it's a cheap way of renewing...

 

lol. I would format just to get that crap out of my system

 

3+ a month.

If there is some pop up or I have downloaded a virus and can't find it, I'm gonna format.

If the computer is too slow/slow start up for too many programs, I format. (computer always run fast when first install windows xp and I always love that)

If the computer got too many errors from windows and other programs which It's impossible to repair, I format.

format format format, it's the best way to be clean!

 

I just reformat when things aren't running the way I want. I can't help notice that this is always a Windows related problem, never because Linux was working terribly. Hmm...wonder why?

 

I format when windows gets slow and needs a kick in butt well not format i make a ghost on all my pcs after i get windows installed updated and my software on it so i can restore my pc back to way i like it in 15mins.

 

I'm a university student, and this is my "learning" laptop. I reformatted right when I got it, and again after I messed with the registry (for the first time). But now, I'm just using CCleaner to keep registry clean, select what runs at start-up, and get rid of temp files. XP is running IMO as good as when I first got it. So hopefully, never have to reformat this computer

 

I format all my Windows machines at the the end of each semester. Nice to get a fresh start, plus they start to drag a little. It is weird how Windows seems to slow over time.

 

On family PC's in the past we probably did a full format once every couple years, generally when a problem occurs. With my laptop I've owned it for nearly three years and never formatted. The HD ended up breaking so I got a clean start but it never seemed to need a clean start.

I've become very good at keeping spyware/viruses out of the machine over the years and cleaning out the few that sneak in and haven't had an overloaded machine for years. I will frequently do a disk cleanup/defrag/random clean with various programs like EZCleaner to get rid of the junk.

 

Usually every 6-12 months...Windows love to slow down due to registry fragmentation and extra entries in the registry, programs that accumulate but you don't use anymore, etc, etc. But I've never really noticed a difference but I do it mostly to keep my system top notch.

Best suggestion: Make an image of your HDD immediately after setting up Windows and all the necessary apps/drivers. Next time you reformat just use that image, update Windows/apps if needed, and you're good to go. Norton Ghost definitely takes much less time than the standard WinXP install (and all the program installs you'll have to do over).

 

Back in my Windows days, it was bi-annually.

Now, under Ubuntu, I don't think I ever need to format. I might want to when Feisty comes out.

 

I format my computer when I'm bored

 

I fall under 5 of those categories. Probably explains why during busy times, I format every month (less busy = less formats).

 

only when something breaks and is too time consuming to try and fix normally in that respect i tend not to install random junk onto the machine.

i have better things to do than reinstall windows every month

 

only when deemed absolutely necesarry...........though I should probably be doing a reformat much more frequently than that.