What's the longest you've gone without formatting?

DarkShadow

DarkShadow

DarkShadow

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Before I would have done it routinely every 6 months. The truth is during my Software Engineering degree I found there was far too many applications on my PC, I knew it would take one hell of a time re-install and reconfiguring everything so I just left it.

After graduating, I never found to the time to do it.

I've been putting up with stupidly long boot times for far too long! Ironically it's been bang on 3 years :eek:

Today, no more! :D

Any advances?
 
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I used to format almost every 3-months. Then before I upgraded my system it stayed for almost a year & run fine. Admittedly I did want to format a couple of times before that but the task of reinstalling applications put me off. Having done it though, there's just something about a clean install: Find it helps you get rid of lots of software you hardly use + install latest versions.

Laptop's lasted more than a year...

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That's since upgrading to Windows 7 & before that about 2-years from new.
 
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I've had my first mega fail. I formatted my drive and it turns out my installation disk was corrupt.

Now I'm currently install my old nlite setup with XP. I knew I should have tested it on VMWare first :(
 
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Still on my original Vista install. It runs faster today than the day I installed it.

Takes me about 3 to 6 months to recover from a format/reinstall. Windows 7 is nice but it's just too small of an upgrade to make it worthwhile for me. Next year I'll be formatting and putting Windows 8 on.
 
The judicious use of jkdefrag kept my main XP system ticking along nicely for five or six years without a format, mainly as the thought of reinstalling everything used to make me go pale. Having now bitten the bullet and put together a new system with Windows 7 64bit, solely for the increased memory support, I was and still am totally underwhelmed by the whole experience a month on.
 
I've been putting it off for years too, normally (like now) I reinstall to get rid of any spyware which may creep in.. I need to decide whether to reinstall now or wait for windows 8 :) how long until its release?
 
Windows 7

Original Install Date: 06/12/2009, 01:50:38

Exceptionally happy with this machine... Can see it lasting another year and because everything is so perfect I'm dreading a hardware upgrade. I try to remember to run perfectdisk on it once a month
 
If I'd spotted this thread a few days ago I could have checked my old PC. But just formatted the disk prior to getting rid of it.

I reckon it was probably 8 years ago. Wasn't used for most of them though, but still ran ok.
 
check out http://ninite.com/ to make the installation of freeware apps SO much easier.

click a few options and walk away for a hour whilst it downloads and installs your favourite apps. try it and enjoy
 
In 3 days it will be one year exactly.

Why bother reinstalling these days, we have SSDs now so it's pretty much irrelevant, no loss in performance.

Only good thing it would be for is clearing out tons of temp / unused data and reg paths that tools don't find. I usually run ccleaner etc once every few months, but my system seems as fast as when I first got it.
 
When I used XP, it was every 6 months give or take. With Windows 7 and Vista, I've had the main system running on just one Vista install and a single Windows 7 install until about 5 months ago where I finally did a fresh install on my SSD. Gained quite a bit of performance, and it's just as fast now as it was fresh.

None of this stops Fallout 3 from randomly deciding to crash though.
 
My XP workstation at work 7yrs.

Original Install Date: 28/09/2004, 13:53:44

Really had no issues with it. Its a development machine with Visual Studio 2003 ~ 2008 installed, and MS SQL, Office 2003 & 2007 etc. Bunch of other development stuff

Even on my home laptop, I'd rarely need to re-install the OS. I don't think I've formatted either of them either since I installed W7. I had Vista for a while year or two and hated it. Windows 7 I've had for a couple of years but tbh, I'm perfectly happy with XP, W7 has nothing I need other than you can use more RAM.

That said you don't need to format a machine to delete the data off it. Likewise to defrag you can simply copy everything off it, then back on.
 
clocka said:
check out http://ninite.com/ to make the installation of freeware apps SO much easier.

click a few options and walk away for a hour whilst it downloads and installs your favourite apps. try it and enjoy
Click to expand...

I had a look at this, anyway to set it so apps can all be set to D: drive (not fill my C: SSD?) didn't see many options other than it just running by itself.
 
When 7 was first released.

Still runs slick now as it did then but then again my maintenance routine is hardcore compared to anyone else's.
 
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