Reformat, how often?

It seems to be an inevitable part of life, reformatting your PC on a semi-regular basis. I'm part-way through reconstructing the myriad different bits and pieces which constitutes my general Windows environment. Having gone through this process many times I have always thought it would be a good idea to make a backup after I've finished installing all the really basic stuff (drivers and Office). The thing is, once I've finished installing everything I'm so naffed off with it that all I want to do is switch it off and do something else for a few hours. The backup never gets created.

I'm thinking though that it would be a fairly pointless task. By the time I next reinstall I would still have to download probably 50MB of updates, reboot 5 times and download new drivers for my graphics card, sound card, mouse, CPU and motherboard. I would also still have to backup and restore the latest snapshot of My Documents (not forgetting the Application Data folder in my Windows profile, lest I lose all my bookmarks and emails).

The task of installing Windows is hardly onerous and takes less than 30 minutes. Office takes about 10 (if that). You have to reboot to install video and sound drivers anyway so there's no escaping it, whichever way you go.

Do you have a reinstall policy or procedure? Is there anything you particularly do that reduces the time or stress it takes? How often do you do it?

Enquiring minds want to know :)

I dont really backup my PC, just my personal stuff, but I know others who have a secondary harddrive that they ghost everything to from the main harddrive after a fresh installation along with software.

Incase shit happens, or they just want to clear up some junk the easy way, save your stuff, and load up the ghosted data back onto the main harddrive.

If you don't install crap you should never need to reformat. My Win98 hasn't been formatted since 2001. I never install anything on it, I just copy the files on and off the harddrive manually (for programs) still working fine and don't connect to the internet with it.

If you really feel the need to routinely reformat, I suggest putting all your stuff on different partitions.

In Windows it is a bit more tricky, but I know that it is still possible, like in Linux, to mount partitions to directories anywhere on your drive to allow for you to have, for example, your My Documents folder in a totally different partition from the rest of the C: drive.

Partition drives so system files are on first part (25%ish) (which is much quicker), put swap file on another drive, plus you can try one of those fancy defrag programs that checks out what files are accessed the most and sticks them near the start of the driver (i.e. system files) also try Bootvis which optimises startup. All this made a great difference on mine. Plus of course use Msconfig to keep a minimal set of Startup programs. Haven't needed to reformat in ages :-)

I reformat about once a year when I upgrade my puters, or something hardware related breaks.

XP is SO much better than win2k in that regard, used to have to reinstall every 2-3 months to stop my system progressively slow down to a crawl.

My Windows partition is 20Gig and I've always kept it at the start of the drive. I've only one hard drive in my PC these days, so unfortunately my page file is a tad slower than could be the case (I've 1Gig of RAM, which helps). All my games and other data is on another partition.

It would be nice to have Thunderbird and Opera store their config and cache on D:, but I cannot see how to acheive this (easily). Besides, it should be a case of configuring Windows to store my profile somewhere other than C:. I'm sure it can be done but it would probably break stupid programs.

ive got 3 paritions 1st is system 2nd is programming and 3rd is games.

I format about once every 3 months just to keep things neat.

Hardly inevitable -- It's been years since I last did it on any of my own computers.

#1 tip: don't install each random piece of crap you come across. If I need to check out some programs for a one-time thing, or if I'm just checking out a bunch of freeware apps, I never install them in my actual OS, but always in a vmware sandbox.

It is trivial to roll back to the latest snapshot before installation in vmware, and leaves absolutely no gunk behind. Only the 'good' applications which I use regularly are allowed outside my sandbox and actually get installed in my real XP install. amazing how much more stable, fast & clean that keeps your windows install.

The last time I reformatted was probably 3 years ago, when I upgraded to my current hard drive.

But I do keep a master DVD-R around with all the installers of every single program, driver and codec I use on any of my computers. Worst case, I have *everything* at hand.

I just keep a folder on my HD where I copy all that stuff to after installing it, organized by type (OS, internet, tools, drivers, codec, etc.), and periodically burn a DVD of it. when updating a piece of software, I'll also make sure to write the new installer to the master folder.

@VinylPusher

I'm not sure about Opera but you can easily share Firefox and Thunderbird directories. In my setup they are located on a 'Home' partition (called H:) and pointed to from whatever is the boot partition or drive.

Just change the respective Profile.ini files to contain a path entry pointing to the location:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=0
Path=H:\Data\Applications\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.32q

Change 'default.32q' to whatever your profile filename is.

You'll find the profiles in:
Firefox - \Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox
Thunderbird - \Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Thunderbird

Where 'user' is whatever account you run under.

Do this on each boot drive or partition and you get the same Firefox and Thunderbird environments wherever you work.

Good luck.

Well, I'm a little paranoid and have found it useful to take advice from http://unattended.msfn.org I have created an unattended installation CD for XP. This has meant that I manually download all the security updates, but should I reformat, I already have most of the updates already and only need to run the CD to re-install everything. Just to make things even easier, I also run a ghost image of a fully installed system. This means I install XP, run all security updates and patches, install all the applications I use, then I make a ghost image and burn it to DVD. Next time I need to re-install I run ghost and reinstall everything in about 20 minutes. operating system, apps, updates...everything.

works for me

:-)

Yup.
1. Remember to commit any changes to SVN.
2. Reformat and reinstall.
3. This is a good opertunity to upgrade all the software you just scrapped to the newer versions that have been out for at least 6 months, if you had bothered to upgrade. Ever.
4. Checkout stuff from SVN.

Yeah, but I don't think I can post it here, without the risk of banage.

Whenever I get a new computer, or significant upgrade, or whenever I want to try out a new Linux distro. So about every 18 months on the Desktop PC, once in a blue moon on various laptops, give or take the occasional urge to see how well Debian supports the TabletPC since I tried last.

When I change / upgrade my whole PC, which is usually ~every 2-3 years. I don't even defrag more than once a year maybe... but I don't install every beta-crap available, so my PC is quite nice and tidy.

I maybe defragment every 6 months and format when I get a new hd/cpu or major change.

This XP machine is running for 2 1/2 years, no reformats, still runs great. Just keep it clean and don't install crappy apps.

I defragment (Windows XP) every time the machine boots up. With Perfect Disk it doesn't usually take more than 30 seconds to do a complete defrag of a normal harddrive on startup.

Whenever a new service pack comes out and completely ruins your machine. Never more. =]