How often do you reinstall your OS (Operating System) ?

[JordanJP]

Just curious to see

 

[zigzag3143]

Just curious to see

I do a disk scrub every 60 days from a vanilla acronis backup

 

[D3ftOn3Z]

I don't reinstall my OS unless it's broken. What i always do is maintaining my PC. And make sure everything runs smoothly. That's all...

 

[pparks1]

I'm probably about once per year on my workstation at home. I used to be more frequent, but I've become far more discriminatory on what I will install that the machine doesn't get too messy any more...thus less need to clean up.

 

[JMH]

Never.
No valid reason to do so has ever become apparent - to date.
[ Each new OS comes on a brand new laptop.]

 

[fseal]

The only time I've ever "re-installed" my OS is because of one of two events.

1) Upgrading from an older version.
2) Upgrading entire machine.

I have never had to reinstall a Windows OS because of it being "trashed". And that goes all the way back to about Dos 3.0.

But to answer the question...

I probably re-install Windows every 2-4 years on each "machine" that is actively in use because of the above reasons.

 

[whs]

Never from scratch, but sometimes from previous images.

 

[richc46]

Since Windows 98, once. The reason was to install Windows 7. Unless there is a very serious problem, I do not think it is warranted to reinstall. Just maintain the computer properly.

 

[monkeys breath]

i do it every 6 month. this is what i recommend for everyone. though with 7 i might have to change this. 7 does not seem to get bogged down like vista and prior with leftovers from installs and uninstalls.

 

[omegatron]

Whenever a new Service pack is released I slipstream it into the base installation and do a test reinstall.

Don't recommend novices try it though as they could screw up their system if they don't know what they are doing.

 

[IownAmoneyPit]

Back in my pre windows 7 days and before helpful forums like this I would be reinstalling my OS every 2 or 3 months either some major system app like widows media center quit working properly or I Couldn't use system restore to fix my problem of the day I would have to do a recovery taking 3 more days to reinstall everything (single OS). Since Windows 7 I have learned the value of using an image to back up both OS. Using triple protection such as windows image backup, Acronis True Image WD Edition after having to buy another USB External hard drive & throw in Paragon backup & recovery for good measure reduces a week and half's work to about 3 hours

I just make sure everything works before I make a new Image and a bonus of making more than one image is I can go backward in time if I am not happy with my current setup or if one of the 3 backups doesn't work plus I do not need to reactivate widows or other software that may require activation or only allow limited activations as they were already activated before the image was created.

 

[murphy25]

not to often if i can help it although saying that i had a problem with the code 5 error on my daughters desktop and installed from within windows and it was practically unuseable so i did a reinstall this morning on it using the "ultimate boot cd" to boot into the windows disk and its fine now.
and i finally recieved an upgrade disc for my other daughters laptop and im installing it now,so that will be 2 desktops and 2 laptops running windows 7 one ancient acer running ubuntu and one laptop with vista still on it (cant do that one charger is knackered need a new one)

 

[bebo92]

whenever i mess up something lol thats me

 

[fred b]

Once a year right about this time, when little bugs have accumulated from all my poking around. This time it was primarily an excuse to move to Win7 from XP.

 

[hclarkjr]

i average about every 6 months or so, i like that fresh formatted feeling

 

[Zepher]

I only re-install if it gets fubar'd.

 

[dbtmellis]

I reintalled my OS about once a year. I was doing this with Windows XP, and i might keep doing it with Windows 7.

This way it can get rid of problems that annoy me but do not effect the OS operations. It also gives me a chance to "clean house" of files and programs that i no longer use. It also gets rid of any leftover files that might get missed after i uninstall something. You might be suprised a how many files are still left behind after an unintall. Most are hidden deep within the registry, and normally would end up causing more problems manually removing them

Also, i have noticed that many downloaded programs off the interent may not allways be kept up to date. This way i re-downloaded everything i use and normally get the most recent version.