How Often Do You Reformat.

My reformats generally stem from wanting to try something new and different rather than a problem that I cannot resolve or don't want to put time/effort into resolved.

Examples might be 1). new release of Windows. 2). New Linux distro 3). wanting to test some wacky scenario for work at home and needing some extra hardware to pull it all off.

For XP, about once a year...but I often didn't need to do so. Man, I used that OS on about half a dozen personal machines since it hit the streets (and still use it at work)...and after they got the bugs worked out in the first year, it was the most stable OS that I had ever used. Thus, I was mostly just reformatting to clean things up and satisfy my OCD.



With Win 7, three time thus far. :)

First Time - installed and it was awesome...but I made the mistake of installing a media meta data synch tool that installed SQL Server without warning...and after extensive effort to remove all traces of it, I finally just reformatted.

Second time - Massive Explorer instability - all related to right-clicking. None of the suggested tweaks solved it...so...

Third Time - is a charm so far. Only one right-click explorer crash...and none since uninstalling AVG and moving to MSE.



In general, I keep all data on a separate drive so reformatting is a breeze. In XP, I simply retargeted "My Documents" to a different drive...and I do something similar with Win 7's libraries. I don't ever backup the OS and apps. I like to start clean and reevaluate what I want and get the latest versions each time.

To be honnest, I only format
1. when I feel that the OS starts to be buggy, too slow or has a virus.
2. when I just bought an OS.

It can be from 6-8 months to 1 year most of the time.

Every 3 months on average here...

Quarterly. From an image of clean install with apps. 20 mins to clean