I’ve had my desktop for 15 months. The common wisdom on SDBM says heavy PC users should reload the OS every 6 months or so, just to keep things lean and mean. I never have.
Probably like you, I’ve added and deleted lots of programs, downloaded tons of financial articles, stored hundreds of family photos, shuffled around countless MS Word and Excel documents, yadda yadda. Despite updated anti-hackware programs and AVG, my PC lags when opening or savings documents.
Download.com offers dozens of trial utility programs, each claiming to optimize, restore, and reinvigorate by deleting junk and decluttering the registry–lots of snazzy bells and whistles. I tried and haven’t noticed a difference. (Years ago, I swore off Norton System Works.)
Bottomline Q: Can a really good utility program even closely approproximate the efficiencies gained from an OS reinstall? Haven’t utility programs become more sophisticated?
This might not help you now… but after a fresh OS install I always run 3dMark (www.futuremark.com). It is a PC benchmarking program that has a nice feature of saving your results online. Often when I feel my PC is “lagging” a bit i’ll fire up 3dMark to find that it’s merely my impatient imagination. Not only that but I can compare my score to other people with similar hardware/drivers.
I used to reinstall my OS on a monthly basis. However, I’ve faithfully used and run AdAware and Spybot (you MUST use both, they work for different things) along with Anti Vir. Whenever I install programs i’m sure to use the windows un-install. In addition i’ll do a monthly defrag.
I find that with a little responsible PC usage I don’t need to reinstall my OS… However, if you slip up once and DO get some nasty virus, it probobly wouldn’t hurt to re-install.
I’m a Mac person, so I suppose I’m officially ignorant on such things, but I was under the impression that that whole “reinstall the OS every xx months” thingie only applied to Windows 95, 98, and ME.
I doubt seriously that any modern operating system, such as XP or Win2K, would ever require you to reinstall an OS unless you had hardware failure or got hit by a virus or erased your own files or something like that.
If the lag is most notable when opening or saving files, I’d try doing a defrag before I got too concerned about it. Open “My Computer”, pick any disk, right-click on the disk drive, select “Tools”, and “Defragment.”
Go through each of the disks and analyze them. If it says to defragment, do it. Note that the defrag itself might take as long as several hours per disk, so you might want to do one a day overnight.
Otherwise, I don’t have a good answer for the OP; I take care of my computer “manually,” so I’ve never tried any of these. If you don’t have viruses or spyware on the system, though, the mere accumulation of time shouldn’t make the system slower. Fragmented drives are about the only real kind of software “wear” on a system.
If you’re not afraid of regedit, take a look at the …/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Run and /RunOnce keys under local machine and current user. If there are more than a couple of dozen lines there, you might consider getting rid of ones that you (a) recognize, and (b) don’t use. These keys hold startup processes, and some of them might be messing with the file system.
Also, if you’ve got anything running whose nature would imply that it monitors files (tracking software, overzealous backups, disk compression, etc.), try turning it off and see if it helps. I’m assuming you’ve never clicked the “compress files on this disk to save space” option – that slows disk access down a lot.
I don’t “reinstall just because” and haven’t ever seen good evidence that it was any benefit. Like Ahunter3, I hard of this more with the Win9X OS’s, which had problems relating to memory leaks–but do you really thing that formatting and then re-installing all the same software again is going to change that?
There are utilities that can remove old and unneeded registry entries, but I have in the past heard that these can do a lot of damage as well–but you would only get a change if you have installed and then un-installed a lot of programs; that’s the only way you’d have accumulated a lot of unneeded registry entries.
~
Repeat after me: “There is NO NEED to reinstall Windows 2000 or Windows XP every 6 months… There is NO NEED to reinstall Windows 2000 or Windows XP every 6 months… There is NO NEED to reinstall Windows 2000 or Windows XP every 6 months”.
I’m typing this up on a computer that has the same install of XP that I initially did just after XP came out - almost four years ago to the date (10/25/2001). In that time I have upgraded this from SP1 (and later, SP2). I have moved the hard drive XP lives on from a P3-933mHz to a P4-3.06gHz box with HT (which means swapping out the HAL from uniprocessor to an SMP). I have upgraded countless drivers and firmware, added and removed a fair amount of hardware, installed and uninstalled oodles of software (including, for instance, upgrading from Office XP to Office 2003). I’ve swapped disk defraggers and antivirus software three times (each). In fact, I’ve done just about every thing I can to this box to pound it into the dirt… but you know what? It’s rock-solid, dude - as fast as it ever was. I benchmarked it not too long ago and it was within 1% of the original benchmark I did on this box after I moved XP to it back in 2003.
The short answer is: no, there are no utility programs that can make a box “as fast as it used to be” because there’s no one answer as to why your system might seem to be slow. Your hard drive could be fragmented*, your drive could be much fuller than it used to (increasing disk seek times), you could have some spyware that your spyware apps don’t know about, you could have tons of apps running at startup that are hogging your RAM (but aren’t necessarily spyware), you could have your AV software accidentally set on “high” instead of “normal”. There are a million things that could be wrong but I can’t tell you what it might be without seeing your computer in the flesh… and neither can 99.999% of so many “utilities” out there.
= although Windows is arguably the worst OS out there for disk fragmentation, ALL operating systems fragment to some degree. It’s hardly a “Windows-only” phenomenon.
I’m with Earl on this one… I still had my original install of Windows 2000 on my machine until a few months ago… installed it sometime in May 2000 (I only remember that because that is the month I started my job). I’ve only recently installed XP (buddy works for MS, so I got it for like $6). Anecdotal evidence, sure, but I can honestly say I have ever had spyware or a slowdown. Hell, staying on the the same OS for 5+ years should tell you that.
That being said, many people do complain about their 2K or XP installs getting slower over time. As was mentioned before, this is mostly likely caused by either spyware or many programs loaded into the start up menu that are grabbing resources on your machine. Others might complain it is due to “bit rot” that happens to Windows… and I have no evidence either way, but I’ve never seen it happen, not even the last time I had Windows 98SE installed. Since you say you install and uninstall programs frequently, I would blame it more on crappy intstaller programs that don’t remove all traces of the program cleanly upon uninstall (yes Norton, I’m looking at you).
Clean out the temp files and defrag occasionally… and quit installing every program under the sun!
If you ever need to reinstall I suggest you make a custom Windows Install CD using nLite which can be found at nliteos.com. It will take your legally acquired Windows XP Install CD Image and let you tinker with it. The best part is that it lets you uninstall Windows programs and services that you normally wouldn’t be able to from within Windows.
If you are patient (it might take a couple tries) you can get your Windows Install CD down to about 300MB, that includes all your up-to-date drivers and Windows’ security patches & hotfixes which are slipstreamed and installed as the OS is installed. It’s possible to minimize it even more depending on what you have in your system and what features you use.
The biggest benefit is that all the programs you uninstall free up diskspace, and if you know which services to uninstall, you can save a bit of RAM usage. It definitely makes a leaner and quicker XP install.
I like checking what processes are running with the free Process Explorer. You can soon tell what’s using your CPU time.
Also, check running programs when you do a CTRL_ALT_DEL, just to see whether you need them.
I’d agree that there’s invariably an awful lot of crap running in the background that you don’t need. A lot of the programs that the average PC user installs rather unhelpfully boot themselves up at startup*. Weed them out of your Startup menu using Spybot.
I have never reinstalled Windows but I do use http://www.pcpitstop.com/ for a free tune up every once in a while. It often recommends tune-ups that I was not aware of.
Two years ago, I purchased an eMac through my school, Houston Community College. I LOVE the Mac, as it is “great” for graphics; however, I have experiened problems at times. (Could be the Operator). Huh? HA! HA!
I do NOT have MS Word on it, but I truly “miss” this, as I am “limited” as to “what” I can do with the present “word” program. (I intend to do something about it at a later date). What? I don’t know!
Other than the fact, I am on my “fifth” modem, I would say: “I love the Mac.”
Waaay back when, my first computer was an PC XT 10MHz clone with MS-DOS 3.3. Over the years I would get a new HD, copy the contents of the old one over. I would also sometimes upgrade the OS. MS-DOS 5.0, various MS-Windows flavors.
I have never done a wipe and fresh install. Never. My computers always benchmark at the top for the CPU based on published listings.
Be careful what you install. Keep the malware off. Defrag. Keep the startups to a minimum. Etc.
Reinstalling the OS every 6 months is the symptom you’re doing something wrong. It is not the solution.
defrag
update/run AdAware (and more infrequently Spybot)
update/run Grisoft’s AVG
Two nights ago, I ran “Disk Cleanup.” It said something about compressing old files. I run this option every few months.
Windows Task Manager says, at this very second, I have 34 processes running: including 9,334 K for Media Player, which always reboots the second I click “stop” process. WT Manager says I’m using about 275 MB of RAM at about 13 percent of CPU (2.2 gig machine). I just now ran Spybot. The only thing it found is Backweb lite, which I deleted.
Last, my 30 gig HD is only about 40 percent full. Not bad.
amen to all of the above. Another way to speed up your computer is to remove as many files and programs that you dont need. My 100,000 files (dont ask) really slowed it down. I archived all the non essential, got it down to 10,000 files and it was almost like new.
I told you earlier in the thread that you don’t need to reinstall… but I have to tell you, if you really have a ton of installs and unintsalls, it might not be a bad idea. A fresh copy of XP is very robust.
The reason I’m giving you for doing so is so you will avoid all the “fixes” and shortcuts. In my opinion, all you need is XP with all the updates, and you are golden. But as I said before, so many installers break and can fuxxor up your system.
I’m a Mac user since, if not quite the dawn of time, pretty close to it (I used a Mac 512Ke a lot as an undergrad, running System 3 from an 800K floppy).
I have never, in my life, for any Mac operating system, found it necessary to reinstall the OS except for the following situations:
• The file catalog on the disk goes south, causing major file corruption, missing / lost files, crashes, and freezes. The disk catalog tells the OS where the files are on the disk, and if it gets hosed, files get written on top of each other. Quite a mess. Usually a good disk utility like DiskWarrionr (nowadays), Norton Utilities (MacOS 9 and back), or MacTools (System 7 era before Norton bought them out) would fix the problem and you wouldn’t have to reinstall anything, but sometimes the corrupted files were central parts of the OS itself, and at that point, yeah, a reinstall would be in order. Let’s see… starting with the hard drive era (System 4 and onwards), I had this happen once with a MacOS 8.6 OS, and…yes, once on a Jaz removable cartridge drive I had a MacOS 8.1 System Folder get really fouled up, although I didn’t reinstall from the installation CD, just nuked and copied the system folder from my main hard drive, but that’s still replacing the operating system, so same diff…other than that, I got nothing
• When changing computers. If you bring a dirve from the old computer, you might have to reinstall the operating system to get optimum use on the new computer. Especially if there is a huge dissimilarity between the old and the new computer. When I replaced my SE with a 7100, I already knew I could not boot from the System 7.0.1 that the SE used, so after hooking up the old drives, I reinstalled from the installation floppies (yeah, back then the OS came on floppies, quite a few of them).
• When changing physical drives, if you don’t have a good backup utility and you’re running OS X. I had a MacOS X 10.0.4 installation on an old hard drive and when I upgraded to a bigger drive, I first tried to back up to the new drive, but it would not boot. Unbeknownst to me at the time, to get an “old world” Mac like my WallStreet to boot OS X, you have to have an extra-smart backup utility or do some complex things manually (an old-world “bless” of the drive) or a backed-up copy of your working OS won’t be bootable. So I just reinstalled the OS and copies over the files I wanted/needed from the old drive when I was done.
A photo is a file. For your MacOS to be able to open it, it needs to know what kind of file it is, and what program should be used to open it.
If you’re running OS X, a graphic photo file extension such as filename**.jpg** or filename**.tif** should be sufficient to tell the OS what to use to open the file when you double-click the file.
If you’re running OS 9, the above is true but less reliably. OS 9 prefers that files have a file type and file creator code (OS X can take those or leave them). If a PC user sends you a file you may have to launch your favorite photo viewer (JPEGviiew, GraphicConverter, PictureViewer, whatever) and go File, Open, and navigate to where the file is, select it, and open it from the File-open dialog. This is particularly true if the file extension is weird (I’ve seen "jpe instead of .jpg for JPEG files, for instance).
If you’re on OS X and you’re getting files sent from a MacOS 9 person, the files may lack file extensions and may furthermore have been stripped of their creator codes and file type codes by the process of emailing them to you. So you’d just see Filename and the icon would just look like a blank sheet of paper. Again, if you launch your favorite pic viewer and go File, Open, navigate to appropriate location, you shoudl be able to pick the file and open it. If necessary, hold down the option key before selecting the “Open” command from the file menu (that will make it show every file even if the OS doesn’t think that program can open that kind of file).
Rebuilding your desktop is often a good idea if you’re running OS 9, especially if it often fails to recognize a file as openable. Reboot, holding down Command-and-Option, and click “OK” when it asks you if you really want to rebuilt the Desktop. Makes your Mac reconstruct the database of file types and applications available on your drives.
Please pardon my ignorance; I’m not much into hardware. When you reinstall the OS, doesn’t that essentially remove every file from your machine? So you have to have a complete backup first (not that that isn’t a good idea anyway), and after the OS is back, reinstall all your other software and reload all your other files?
