Does anyone go through Window OS's like me?

For some reason looking back, I have had like 10 different installs of Windows on my laptop in the past 3 months. I'm just wondering, but when someone here gets a virus or something messes up, do you guys try and fix it or do you just say screw it and reinstall Windows?

 

I haven't reinstalled mine at all. I have tools like MS Office 2007 Enterprise, VS 2008 Professional, and Photoshop CS3 that are my Dad's, and it's a pain for him to bring the CDs home from work and get me the serial keys. But I go to clean sites, keep up to date on virus protection, and use McAfee site advisor for FF.

 

If I had a virus, I would never trust an anti virus program cleaning it. I'd reinstall Windows again. But my computer(s) haven't been infected for more than 3 years now. I don't even install an anti virus anymore. Windows Firewall FTW!!!

 

This would be a great topic for a poll!

But to answer your question: No, I haven't had a need to change or re-install an OS in quite a few years. Maybe, oh, four or so.

This on two notebooks and two desktops in the house; each for one member of my family.

I do a lot of dual boot configs to play around with other OSs, but never have to mess with the original OS installs that I intend to keep as the machines' OSs.

 

Good suggestion, wished I would have thought of that, too late now



But yeah I haven't received a virus in a long time (Except for when I toyed with XP in a Virtual environment with IE and no firewall, lol). I just get bored for some reason and want to try something different (Windows 7, Vista, XP, Ubuntu). The reason this made my think of this was because I'm currently running Win7 and are about to go back to Vista do to bugs. Guess I can't have everything

 

wow ten times more like none for me in more than a year

 

I've reinstalled Windows on my old laptop probably 4 times or so in the 4 years I've had it. I rarely get viruses, and when I did once, I immediately just backed up my data and reformated.

 

I have only been knowingly infected twice, and one of the machines was not mine; that said, my policy would be to *not* reinstall Windows if I was very confident that the virus was removed.

However, when I used to mess around with Windows alot (ie, hose it), I almost always spent the time trying to fix it before reinstalling Windows.

 

whoa this is for me...i re-installed my OS 6-7 times or even more within a year i bought...i play around by dual booting or trying new OS and i know that i will mess up at one point but i cant stopping do it.but as i remember i never re-installed with a virus problem.

 

Before I mastered the recovery console of XP, I reinstalled about 5 times in a month and a half...let's just say that Grub>me ...Once I figured out "fixmbr", though, I>Grub...

then there was the time that Daemon tools caused behavior that I thought was a virus...only after a reinstall did I learn that the behavior I was experiencing was due to DT requiring my XP to search for a RAID array on boot...

I like to experiment too much, and I can't leave well enough alone...I take things as personal challenges sometimes, and refuse to give in...now I switch distro's and OSs with confidence, as I have learned how to fix my mistakes, instead of erase them.

 

I do an install about every 4 months or so on each of my computers.

 

I usually reinstall (restore from backup image) once every ~ 3-6 months. Vista's complete PC backup is a wonderful tool for doing this.

 

Last time I reinstalled windows was June 2007. That was on my old computer that had 1GB RAM and vista. I downgraded to XP.

 

The most times I ever installed Windows in a month was 3, in December 2007 and January 2009. I had Vista on Dec 1, reinstalled Vista on Dec 6 or so to fix Vista problems, reinstalled Vista on Dec 26 because Grub had crashed on me after I set up a dual-boot with Ubuntu, and installed XP on Dec 27 because it wasn't Vista and I finally had XP. I installed Vista four times in Sept-Dec 2008, and XP once, so I was pretty tired of OS installs. All the times except when Grub crashed it was due to Vista problems (the XP install being to avoid the Vista problems long-term).

edit: I also put Windows 3.11 on my machine in December 2007. Not counting that in the totals here as I never really used it due to it being too difficult to set up the Internet on it.

January 2009 was Windows 7 all three times. Once being the initial install, and twice being to fix slowdowns due to poorly-compatible sound card drivers.

Since December 2007 I've only replaced my main Windows install once, to improve performance that had degraded due to doing experiments with Windows system files (not a good idea to do on your primary OS). I also set up a dual boot of XP Home and XP Home once, but that was because I'd accidently messed up the boot table when uninstalling Solaris fixmbr wasn't working.

So in 20 months, I've done 10 installs of Windows. 4 Vista, 3 XP, 3 Win7. But the first six months included half of those, and since getting XP I've only reinstalled my primary OS once. Generally speaking I don't like to reinstall my primary OS - it takes awhile to get everything configured right, y'know. I'd recommend setting up a dual-boot and leaving one OS constant if you plan to switch things up a lot - that way you'll always have an OS ready to go if you need to get something done.

Viruses haven't been an issue for me - the only ones I've caught in recent time have been biological. I don't actually have any security software running on either XP or Windows 7, although every few months I might let Windows Defender do a fruitless search.

At this point my plan is to reinstall Windows XP whenever I notice it being slow; hopefully that won't occur until late 2009, and if it's still fine then, I'll just leave the current install as is. I may also reinstall Windows 7 when the release candidate comes out, although I hope not to have any good reason to reinstall the current beta (as in, hopefully it will keep working fine now that I know which driver not to install).

 

It seems like Virus' aren't really an issue anymore as much as they used to be (~Windows 98 era), that's really good to hear. I haven't used a virus program in a long time, probably since 03-04'

 

I reinstall (or rather restore from an image) pretty often. I have an image of XP just how I like it, with all my software installed. Restoring only takes about 15 minutes, where fixing a serious problem usually takes longer.

Since you are reinstalling so often you might want to consider imaging your drive. Also, using a sandbox can help eliminate some factors that make you want to reinstall.

 

I once did 47 reinstalls with drivers and all my programs (about 82 of them) in a period of 1 week. I was basically trying to test every thing I could test to figure out some error I had. Now, its 1 reinstall every semester of college.

 

What do you use for imaging software?

 

I used to reinstall quite a bit switching in between XP and Vista, mainly due to the fact that I had problems connecting to my school internet under XP. Did something like, 10 installs in under 3 months. There was also twice where my computer had a stuttering problem while playing games, and I was lazy to find the cause of the problem so I reinstalled again, since it wasn't a big deal anyway.

However I finally got my wireless card replaced (Apple finally admitted that it was a faulty wireless card and a Windows issue) and now I'm back to XP. Been using XP for 6 months without any reinstallations.

 

I've only reinstalled when Vista first came out but haven't been doing it after SP1. I have so many programs and data on my laptop now that reinstalling would be a pain. I tweak it instead. An antivirus and firewall is a must though. Some old programs for XP will crash Vista, now I make sure that it's able to work in Vista. Microsoft has a list of programs that's compatible with Vista and the list is growing.

 

I've went through numerous re-installs on all my machines over the past 8 years. The longest I've gone without reinstalling is a grand total of 4 months (on my desktop that is).

The main reason for the re-installs is that I tend to mess up something critical which is simpler to fix by simply "fragging" my disk and starting all over. Sometimes though I've re-installed simply because I had way too much stuff on my machine to un-install.

 

Goin on 3 years here. Guess I know how to use it without screwing things up....

 

I need to learn your secret(s) to maintaining a system that long without any issues...

 

Well, it's a VIA chipset so once I got a set of drivers that work with most of my peripherals (USB TV card was the one that screwed up most) I decided not to even try reloading windows. I shut off 'automatic updates' quite a while ago, decided IE6 was good enough, stopped at WMP 10 (WM 9 codecs), stopped at SP2, etc...

 

Ah, VIA...say no more.

 

I've been running the same install of XP on my 1520 since November 2007 ... although I have had to use norton ghost once or twice.

I upgraded my parents to xp in June of 2006 ... it has not been reinstalled since.

 

My 1530 is 1 year old, and a few weeks ago..I just did my first clean install

It runs so much better now!


Cin

 

I ran over 5 years on my XP initial install. I reinstalled recently and it is like a new machine again. I can't believe the difference.

 

My Xp machine is 4 years
my vista is 6 months

my fedora machine is 2 years

just got my laptop and it has been running xp pro x64 for about 3 days now....YES!

 

I've never had a virus, but I generally format anywhere from 12-20 times a year for one reason or another.

 

ITs just so much easier to not mess up your install by doing something stupid, and not get viruses. Served me well for ages.

The only time I re-install is when I decide to do something along the lines of dual boot.

 

Hah!

You probably have gotten a virus somewhere along the way, but wiped it out in a format!