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How often do you format your PC?

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Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
About one every year.

Not necessarily because of errors, but because I get bored on some days and just decide to spend it reinstalling everything.
Click to expand...

Heh. Been there, done that.

I have two main rigs, and one day I just deciding I want to swap the cases, so I dismantled both and reassembled them in the opposite cases.. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: atom
I guess I must be super lazy because before I installed XP about 2 months ago I had a 4 year old install of Win2k that ran perfectly.
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:thumbsup: for Win2k.

i only migrated to XP because of the remote desktop feature, and because i got it for free.
 
once a year... a tad more depending on how lazy i am to backup all my stuff...

i dont need to format but its nice to flush out everything you dont use anymore
 
Around every three or four months or whenever I upgrade my MB.

As much as I love Ghost for my clients, I never use it at home. I like rebuilding from the XP CD. 😀
 
When I build a new computer. On the average, I'd guess that a typical computer out here goes for about two years before being replaced.
 
I do a pretty good job of maintaining my systems, so I can usually wait two or three years between OS rebuilds. Hell, I even had a Windows 95 system last for 4 years before I reformatted it and put Windows 2000 on it. Used it every day for game testing, too.
 
Originally posted by: wyvrn
once a day

then twice on sundays
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We're talking about formatting here wyvrn not.....:Q




I reformat when I feel programs have started to slow down significantly or when things corrupt.
 
Not counting the hard drive replacement last week (old drive was on the verge of dying, I just decided to start over on the new drive instead of ghosting), the last time I formatted was over 2 years ago. The old install was still good, I just wanted to clean things out a bit.

ZV
 
Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
About one every year.

Not necessarily because of errors, but because I get bored on some days and just decide to spend it reinstalling everything.
Click to expand...

I have that same boredom phase.
 
Every 6 months or so...

I just got a DVD burner, is there a way to make a bootable DVD with an image of my system on there so after I do a reformat I can just pop in the DVD and it will restore my system?
 
Bout twice a year. First thing to go is generally printer support; my printer will start printing gibberish at some point in a winblows installation and there's no fixing it. Then the Creative Labs bloatware will go. Next, who knows? 🙁 I should try Linux...
 
I had gone almost 2 years before I bought a raid card and second HD.

Installed XP and it's been a few months now.

My wife is running an install that's about 2 1/2 years stong but she is bloated with Spyware. Gonna deal with that later.

With 98 it seemed like I had to do it all the time. With XP I usually can clean out the crap.

I just reinstalled on the dual boot but that was only because I needed to change the partition size 😉

I Still need to install Fedora again But I am tryi ng to decide if I want to do that or Mandrake.
 
Could you lamers suck any more at troubleshooting? I built my current PC back in about July 2000. It's had hard drives added, with the old drive Ghosted to the new. It's still running Win98SE, which was upgraded from Win98. Never once did a reformat, though there have been plenty of software problems to iron out.

Son's computers aren't much newer, and have been upgraded form Win98SE, to WinXP with NO reformatting. All issues were handled by good, old fashioned troubleshooting, that has been honed by years of taking the time to do that, instead of formatting and starting from scratch.
 
I run a spare hard drive and do a ghost back up to it every now and then so if things
go squirrelly I'll just restore and not go through 3 to 4 hours of putting all my programs
on my PC!
 
Originally posted by: heat23
Every 6 months or so...

I just got a DVD burner, is there a way to make a bootable DVD with an image of my system on there so after I do a reformat I can just pop in the DVD and it will restore my system?
Click to expand...


I'm sure you can make a bootable dvd with ghost to restore your system.
You might check into the software and applications forum and get some of
the experts to tell you how to do it.
 
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