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Poll: how often do you format ?

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when it's not stable
my currently setup win98se plus AMD althon is so rock, it's going strong after 10month. so prob not going to touch it
 

To me, completely formatting and reinstalling everything is like cleaning my room. I feel dirty if I havent formatted my hd in ~3 months. I seek and test so much programs that at some point my windoze get's enough and starts whining..

I have all my work files and everything at another HD, I only have windoze and some generic programs on my c:. So if my windoze/hd crashes, I dont loose anything valuable. And clean install of windoze 98 and the programs I use most only takes less than a hour.

Cleaning my room takes a day. 😀 Seriously.
 
It varies for me, if I'm bored I'll do it, if the system is sluggish etc. Otherwise every few months or so.

--Mark

*EDIT*
Where's the poll????? I came here looking for a poll..
How dare you turn AnandTech's Forums into a place of lies 😉
j/k, obviously
*EDIT*
 
I am not comfortable lumping all the 9x variants together. They are significantly different:

- Win95 original: FAT16, buggy; not recommended.
- OSR2: Fat32, stable, sleek shell; highly recommended.
- Win98/SE: bloated IE4/5 shell; not recommended
- WinME: bloated IE4/5 shell, crippled DOS; not recommended.

- WinNT/2K: bloated IE4/5 shell, resource hog, gaming incompatabilities: not recommended for a strictly gamin OS.

I prefer OSR2 over 98/ME because OSR2 is free of the bloated IE4/5 shell. WinNT/2K suffers not only from the IE4/5 shell, but it additionally has well known gaming incompatabilities, plus it is especially hoggy of resources.

Yes, you might be able to get your games running on it, but it is analogous to a K6: your odds are higher of running into some incompatability.

OSR2 forever! Everything that came afterward is the emperor's new clothes, at least from a strictly gaming perspective.
 
- Win95 original: FAT16, buggy; not recommended.
- OSR2: Fat32, stable, sleek shell; highly recommended.
- Win98/SE: bloated IE4/5 shell; not recommended
- WinME: bloated IE4/5 shell, crippled DOS; not recommended.

That's your opinion, fact is that it is the same basic core running underneath. And I don't know what you have against this so called "bloated IE4/5" shell. Games run just as fast in Win98SE as they do in Win95.



<< Yes, you might be able to get your games running on it, but it is analogous to a K6: your odds are higher of running into some incompatability.

OSR2 forever! Everything that came afterward is the emperor's new clothes, at least from a strictly gaming perspective. >>

How many times have we heard this same argument? K6s, Via chipsets, and now Win2k? The fact is that anyone that is careful about setting up their system can get everything running just fine on these. If you wish to believe that Windows NT5 has problems, then you can but there are many people on here who can attest to the fact that Win2000 will run any software they want just fine.
As for OSR2 forever, what about Whistler? It's Windows NT 5.1 and it will be for the consumer market. It is to replace Win95/98/ME completely, and its' basically Win2000 stripped down a bit for the &quot;home market&quot; obviously microsoft is quite confident in Windows NT 5's ability to run any software for any group. Gamers included.
Especially with Windows Whistler and 2000 all supporting the WDM driver model Win95 support is going to be sorely lacking in the future I think. I'll agree with you, Win95 is the best of Win9x core...but the days of the Win9x core are very limited.

I'm curious...how much RAM do you have? With 128MB I ran games under Win2000 just fine. I don't consider 128MB to be an unreasonable amount of memory for a current computer.

Well it's been an interesting debate, but I think we've about exhausted our arguments I feel like I'm repeating myself, so I think I'll just leave it alone now. You seem quite satisifed with Win95 OSR2.1 and since it's your PC that's really all that matters. Good bye now 🙂
 
WinNT, K6, nVidia: yes, if you are lucky you can get things running on them, but the odds are higher that you will have troubles of some kind.

OSR2, Thunderbird/Pentium, 3dfx: you can be sure it is going to work.

As for Whistler, yes MS has been trying to force all the consumers onto the NT kernel for a long time, and once again they are saying that they are going to do it. Maybe they will end up releasing another 9x OS though. Then again, ME is worthless, so perhaps there is no point to looking forward to a successor to ME. I am confident that OSR2 will continue to run stuff just fine for the foreseeable future. My hope is that, say, three years from now Linux or something be a major alternative on the desktop, with as many games for it as Windows has.

Until then, I am clutching my OSR2 with my clenched lil fingers.

And I'm not buying an nVidia card until the 3dfx engineers have put all the good stuff into it.

Dufusyte (rebel)
 


<< My hope is that, say, three years from now Linux or something be a major alternative on the desktop, with as many games for it as Windows has. >>

Well we can definately agree on that point, I love Linux. I don't think it's very likely though, Linux doesn't cater very well to the masses, and an OS has to do that before it can get major recognition. But you never know, it would certainly be nice if I could Linux as my only OS I would. I'll certainly hope with you that this day will come though.
 
I've reformatted once on this system in about 8 months. (win98se)

I'm planning on formatting again very soon when I get the time, and it'll win2K time!!
 
Depends on how much HW I roll through and how much crap I run or install. My system at work is quite clean and rarely needs reformatting, my home system just went through a double labotomy because I wanted dualhead to work so I went from Win95 to Win98, but after the 2nd monitor's refresh caused the primary's monitor to look bad and Win98 blew it's head off (long story) I simply went back to Win95 and used the TV out route.

All the program files and such are on different partitions.
 
Wow, I'm not alone. I used to format quite often, whenever I was bored or did a motherboard upgrade. Which happened to be quite often.

I've gotten much better, I usually only format when something tragic happens and it's just not worth trying to repair all the crap that got changed. You have to decide if it's worth your time to find and repair the problem or start over. Sometimes things get so screwed up it's easier to start over.

Of course, there is a lot to be gained by learning what broke so if it happens again you don't have to spend the time re-installing. It's a trade off. Works the same way for hardware. Certain things it's more cost effective to replace than to fix.









 
I reformat about every 3 months to keep it fresh n tasty
thats using windows 2000
also go keep all the drivers updated and performance at is top
I have been a tech for 3 years now and its seems just about right

but i have a better question
do you leave your pc on or off
 
Often a matter of weeks, since I'm a perfectionist. Hopefully my Linux partition will last, but not if a better filesystem comes along! (ie a newer ReiserFS)
 
Depends on when I got to class. Sometimes we install NT, Win98 about 3 times a day. Sometimes more offen.
But for my personal Use. I have never reinstalled (or formatted) my Nt box. I reinstalled Win98 once and that was in less then a week after building my computer. Added more stuff to it so it was easyer to reinstall. (formatted)
That was about 21 months ago.

Wolfie
 
I usually reformat 5 times a week. Serious. Of course, I don't exactly sit around to re-install windows. I have a perfect image of the computer's booting partition. I have the computer setup so that the data/games/applications are on 1 partition and windows core files are on a separate partition. This way, when I install something that messes up windows, I just reload Windows to the &quot;perfect image&quot;... I am to paranoid.
 
Every 6 months no matter the OS.

And yes, OSR2 rocks! I only use w2k and win98b. 98 and me are slow and unstable.
 
I formatted before I installed Win95 OSR2. Did not format when I installed Win2k along side of it (not on top of it). I see no reason to reformat. I have never come across a problem that could be solved by formatting, which could not be solved in some other (usually less time consuming) manner. I have found that formats also rarely solve problems. How do I know this? My dad had a computer that gave him a lot of trouble, every time he brought it to the place he bought it from, they just reformatted and gave it back to him. We eventually discovered that the CPU was overheating (their fault), so they had to replace it.

Also, I tweak Windows way too much to reformat. I don't remember half of the tweaks I've used, and tracking them down again would be a royal pain. Were I to reformat I would most definitely have to go with the ghost image idea.
 
I used to reformat a lot, but now I'm using Ghost to back up my OS partitions after every install/change, and I never have to reformat. I guess the next time I'll reformat will be for Whistler or maybe a new motherboard...
 
Everyday! Seriously. Ask the Anandtech moderator who is responsible for sending users their login info. I request it everyday. I format everyday. It's stupid, but my computer is always fast 😀.
 
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