Windows 7 Format Time

Just curious to see how long people have gone before they either felt it necessary [due to significant performance dips] or decided to do it for safe keeping.

I'm curious to see how it stacks up compared to the Vista/XP systems, specifically because this is the biggest OS to date.

Please list version (home, business, etc.) and bit. Discuss performance/program problems that prompted the reinstallation.

 

I do it about every 3 months just for fun. I tinker too much with programs, drivers, etc, and kinda need to do it. Performance isn't really an issue when I do it. I just do it 'because'.

 

Windows 7 does not suffer from performance degradation from normal use like Windows XP did. If you are reinstalling constantly you're a hopeless screw up.

 

Just for fun? Wow...I went through a lot of hell in (to get it right) cloning my HDD to my M4 SSD recently just so I didn't have to do a clean install and re-install my programs and re-do my aesthetics configurations....and here you are doing this for fun?

 

You mean Vista? Old faithful XP was flawless!

 

No, vista had performance degradation out of the box...mainly because too many PCs with it were terribly underpowered. I swear I have seen hundreds of pcs that came with vista and only 1gb of ram or less. There is a special place in hell for dell and hp execs who decided to sell vista "capable" machines with so
Little memory.

 

Hmm, i spent around a year before doing a clean install on my G73 due to me messing with hardware and software way too much (see my custom user title ). Then i did another clean install two months later due to installing a SSD. Desktop is brand new so it's been running 7 for only two months and the N50 was upgraded to 7 less than a year ago and technically it was an upgrade, not a clean install. I didn't answer the poll, none of the choices suit my situation.

 

I have 4 images of my OS partition.
1. Microsoft products only(Windows 7 Sp1 and Office 2003) without any patches.
2. above with all patches(only Microsoft patches) currently available.
3. above with drivers for all devices(no exclamation mark in Device Manager)
4. my working system partition with all necessary programs.

Formatting of the OS partition is not necessary for me as my image tool restores the whole partition with all NTFS structures including MBR.

It takes 5 min to restore my OS partition.

 

Been about at least 6 Months since formatted and reinstalled an image, when samsung had destructive firmware updates for 470 Series SSD, now they are not.....

Cheers
3Fees

 

If you ticked 'still running factory install', please comment on how long that is.

 

I reinstalled windows in my laptop about two months ago when I receive by mail my awesome M4 SSD.

I keep reinstalling it almost every month for others people laptop.

 

Over a year on two systems.
One re-loaded to sell after about 14 months of use - no issues
Second after 19 months to update/fix some software bugs (not a Win 7 issue, but the software).

 

I reinstalled my desktop and my laptop when I upgraded to SSDs. Reinstalled the wife's computer about a year ago because I accidentally installed 32-bit Windows the first time around and didn't realize it and she was getting "out of memory" errors while working in Photoshop. HTPC has been running the same Win 7 install it was running in 2009, even survived a motherboard swap. I have Acronis set to make automatic backups every week and have it set to save 2 month's worth before auto-deleting so I always have an image to go back to for something that would normally take a reinstall. Only had to do it twice though, on my desktop because IE and Firefox were both crashing on launch and I couldn't determine the cause, and on the HTPC because GTA4 was crashing and again I couldn't determine the cause. In both cases, the issues didn't repeat themselves after restoring from a backup.

 

On my Toshiba, I'm running the factory install. Mainly because I still haven't made my restore discs, but also because there really wasn't much bloatware out of the box. I think the only things I uninstalled were Skype, Norton, and the Best Buy PC app. However, on my desktop, I reinstalled Windows 7 about a week or two ago. It was when I bought my 1TB hard drive.

 

2 months since my last reinstall. I had to reinstall because I deleted a whole slew of registry things by accident (Don't ask) which caused my install to not even boot anymore. Before that about 3 months since I got an SSD. Before that about a year (When I got my laptop).

 

So it sounds like a great number of reinstalls are either due to:

1) SSD installations;
2) to deal with existing 3rd party software.

Do you have Acronis running from the system drive? And are you restoring FROM that drive or a secondary? Because I know trying to restore images on Windows 2000 with an older version of Acronis would screw up the root user and its settings/documents/settings and it was essentially useless for backing anything on the main C:/windows/users (or whatever win2k is).

And I don't encourage it, but does anyone have experience with the built-in Win7 backup programming?

 

I run it from C:\Program Files(x86)\Acronis (default program folder) but it backs up to its own drive. Hard drives are so cheap that I have an extra one in each of our machines solely dedicated to store scheduled backups.

 

'reinstallations' because of a new hard drive or SSD shouldn't be counted as a reinstall, they are NEW installs because of new hardware......

Not the fault of the OS at all.

 

Agreed ^. The point of this poll was to mainly figure out how people have been dealing with their OS problems, or lack thereof.

 

Want to bump this and get some more input.

 

I'm going to do it 3 or 4 times this weekend. I won an SSD and am writing a review and figured I'd make it a practical review (i.e. how fast to load the OS and office, moving large chunks of compressed and uncompressed data, etc.). Other than that, almost never.

 

Installed Win7 as an upgrade the day it was released and have not had to touch it since..............

 

Not now they are not. I put a new hard drive in my old computer because the old drive went bad that I gave to my Grandmother. I was going to replace both of them but wow $69 including tax to replace a 160 GB HD with a new 160 GB HD. I remember buying a laptop 320 GB HD in 2010 that was half the price of that drive. Bigger drivers were over a $100. Talk about price gouging but I had no choice in buying it.

Anyway since I got my laptop I did a clean install and it is still running Windows 7 Pro x64 since September 2011. My Grandmothers computer my old desktop I gave her is running Windows 7 Pro x64 since February 2012

 

Normally within the first 1-2 years something screws up in the registry from me tinkering around with new programs that I do a reformat.

 

Same here.

 

always factory(i.e. first time installation) since NT days, on average 5-7 years and never see a 'degredation'.

 

On the computers i'm the only one using, only when i need to because i played too much with modded drivers and such or when i change a hard drive to a SSD for example. On other systems used by others than me on a as needed basis. Right now i've been running the same windows installations for a while, 6 months to a year and i saw absolutely no difference in performance on any of my computers. I keep everything up to date, do the occasional cleanup of the temp files and that's about it.