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Poll: How often do you reformat?

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Generally 2-3 months. Sometimes more. One summer I formatted once every 3 days trying out video cards, sound cards, and different OS's
 
This thread made me want to do it, so I did. Took me an hour to reinstall XP and most of my drivers. Ahhh, clean install.
 
Whenever it needs it. If it's slowing down and giving me lots of errors, I transfer my valuable stuff to my other HD, then format that sucker away. Usually about every 5 or 6 months, but it's been more like every 2 or 3 since I started getting viruses 🙁
 


<< Wow, what's with you people? I haven't formatted this one since I installed Windows 95 OSR 2.5, I didn't even format when upgrading to Win2k.

How do you manage to screw things up so royally that you need to reformat? I've never seen a problem that bad that wasn't hardware related...and if it's hardware related, a format isn't going to help anyway. >>



Last week my master boot record became corrupted and it was irreparable. I had to completely format my c: drive. Other than that I've never had a major snafu but I had a habit of reformatting in 98/ME every few months just for performances' sake (fat32 = 😱)
 


<<

<< Wow, what's with you people? I haven't formatted this one since I installed Windows 95 OSR 2.5, I didn't even format when upgrading to Win2k.

How do you manage to screw things up so royally that you need to reformat? I've never seen a problem that bad that wasn't hardware related...and if it's hardware related, a format isn't going to help anyway. >>

 >>



Wow, you should format, I bet you'd see a difference in performance.

Not too likely. I don't have extra programs loading in the background that I do not wish to have loading. My drive is not fragmented.
My system (Dual PIII 450, 512MB RAM, Atlas 10k SCSI drive) still outperforms the Dell (P4 1.5GHz, 256MB RDRAM, 7200RPM IDE drive) system that we got at work just a couple months ago.



<< Is this also to say that you didn't convert your file system to NTFS over FAT32 when going to Win2k? That should be a crime 😛 Just friendly advice 😀 >>



I have NTFS on a partition or two where I keep my MP3s, but all my testing has shown them to be about the same, with FAT32 occasionally winning out on speed. NTFS has some advantages, but not enough to justify the conversion or loss in performance.
 
Back when I used to be constantly upgrading my machine I would format all the time just to keep my system clear of all the orphan files. Now I haven't done any significant hardwae upgrades so I don't think I've formatted in about 2 years. I'm trying to time my next upgrade so that I get a P4 motherboard that officially supports 133mhz processors and a new hard drive at the same time. That way I'll have a nice clean system and a faster hard drive and I'll only have to format once 😀
 
I like to do it when I get back to school in the fall and again when I get back in the spring. Start off each semester with a fresh install. Although I really don't think I need to do it that often. I have very few problems with my machine.
 
Historically, I tend to reformat about every 6 months or so, depending on what I'm doing. However, unless I seriously screw something up, I don't plan to reformat for a while on the current Win2K box, since you couldn't pay me to run WinXP. My backup machine, however, will get a clean install of Mandrake 8.2 pretty soon, just for fun.
 
Whenever I switch to a new system or in the most recent case when a hard drive fails and fuxors the registry.
 
normally ~once a year, but this year, i've already reformatted a a few times. heh

hmmm... /me goes back to backing up stuff before formatting again. 🙂
 
I had to reformat ~once in about 6-10 months with Win98SE because it usually became very unstable some 4-6 months after the install.
Last time was about 5 months ago before installing XP and so far it's been running fine 🙂. I'd guess that the next reformat will be due to a hardware upgrade or a major screwup.
 
I used for format every 3-6 months but since installing Win2K (and then upgrading to XP) I haven't found the need, though I am considering doing it soon because I recently got a Radeon 8500 and I'd like to get rid of my Matrox drivers fully.
 
Wow, classic bell curve. nice 🙂
I format every 6 months, but since XP I don't know when I'll format next. Probably when digital outuput on my soundcard is supported under linux out of the box/ISO.
 
Once a year, I'd say, for hdd with OS. Not often for hhds that I store data.
My 40GB HDD, that I've had since Feb 2000, is still not formatted yet because I've been putting all my important stuff in there (warez, porn, etc. 😉 )
 


<< every day

rolleye.gif
😛 >>



Same here. Whadda you know.
 
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