Well today my roomie deleted out everything from the computer, and I mean everything, before starting to reinstall what we need. One of the first things back up is the net of course but we still have more to put in.
I was thinking, isn’t it recommended that you do that every so often to clean anything bad out of your computer? So how many people actually do that?
Personally I couldn’t do it on my own. I’m the 'net whiz and my roomie is the comp whiz. When the computer goes into DOS well I get lost. The first computer we owned did run solely on DOS but my father never let me near it except to play games, so I have no clue how to go about deleting and reinstalling everything. Well once Window’s is back I’m cool… but I really digress.
So how many people actually do this?
[sub]Note: I really do notice a difference in how my computer runs immediately after a purge. It’s about 5 years old and runs amazingly well with a purge. It’s wicked![/sub]
My Win 98 Machines get it about once a year. They accumulate a lot of crap from ill-behaved programs, it really helps to redo it, install all the latest drivers, and so on.
I used to do it about once every six to eight months back in Win3.1/95/98, but haven’t had to do it at all with XP yet; I’ve not noticed any degradation in performance due to partially uninstalled clutter etc.
I redo mine 3 or 4 times a year, and it takes no time at all. Back up the data to tape, throw in the ghost boot disk and CD image of my machine, and 10 minutes later I’m done, with all of my standard apps installed.
And I don’t have to deal with unistalling a bunch of crap I don’t need anymore either.
I generally avoid putting crap on my computer that needs to be purged, so no, I don’t purge. About the closest I get is when I try to install a new game and I don’t have the hard drive space, so I have to go uninstall a few old games.
If it really gets bad, I figure that’s God telling me I need to buy a new computer, and I don’t want to piss off God and all, so I go do it.
I do this every year or so. FDISK and re-install. Kindof like an oil change. And, it’s a good excuse to upgrade some hardware and install newer drivers, etc.
Never. My 4-year-old Win 98 machine is getting a little pokey, but my wife won’t let me touch it as she can’t live without her email, and that’s the machine with internet access.
Do I understand correctly that it’s a good idea to wipe your computer clean periodically and start from scratch? I go through and delete programs that are no longer used and I run Norton every so often. So you’re saying that isn’t enough?
If it matters, I have a 200mhz, fairly ancient Toshiba. I put Win98 on it this past summer. I use it mostly for surfing, chatting, and AutoCAD - am I an accident waiting to happen here?
We’re running Win 98 on a Compaq Presario at home, and did in fact purge it once, maybe two years ago. It wasn’t all that difficult; we got rid of a lot of unused software and the thing ran just dandy.
It’s getting a little pokey again, but if I do purge it I’m gonna make sure we have all the software we need before it happens. We didn’t lose anything irreplaceable last time, but it never hurts to be safe.
With win9x I’d do it once or twice a year. Win2k doesn’t seem to require it quite as frequently. I expect I’ll only have to do it during major hardware upgrades (mobo/proc, that sort of thing).
With win9x it was almost a requirement, though. A fresh install vs a 6 or 8 month install is almost like night and day.
I completely purged and reinstalled, including the OS on my XP machine a few months ago. Disk cleanup and de-frag wasn’t cutting it. Mainly, I was having a problem with programs “Encountering a Problem and Needing to Shut Down.” It’s been much better since, so I’ll probably do that ever 8-12 months. I think part of it may have been bugs picked up in filesharing or something.
I’ve only did it once, with a Win98 machine, and I notice great improvement. I’ve since bought a new machine with XP, had it less than a year, haven’t felt the need to purge it yet. But it will likely happen someday.
I’m with Athena; I am very careful about what I install, so although I’ve had this here Win98 machine since '99 I have never had the need to reinstall anything. Yes, I have a fair amount of unnecessary crap taking up space on my hard drive at this point (DLL’s and stuff left over from old programs), but that really doesn’t slow down your machine. Most machine atrophy is the result of badly-behaved programs that tamper with stuff they shouldn’t (adware, spyware, etc.) or programs that install annyoing little pieces that run at start-up and do nothing but eat memory and CPU cycles.
My primary line of defense is to be careful about what I install. I don’t install anything that craps up my computer like Kazaa (I use Kazaa Lite) or any of those other spyware-carrying “free” programs. If I install something and find I don’t care for it, I uninstall it, plain ‘n’ simple. That may leave remnants behind, but like I said, just eating up a few hundred kilobytes of disk space isn’t going to slow down your machine.
Another thing I do is keep a very close eye on what processes are running on my machine. The Windoze task list only shows you some of what’s actually running. It’s possible for sneaky programs to hide themselves so they don’t even show up in the task list. That’s why I have a program called Process Viewer which lets me see, in excruciating detail, all the processes running on my system. If I find something that shouldn’t be there, I generally run msconfig and disable it, or uninstall it completely. Incidentally, I just fired up Process Viewer and discovered that some stupid add-on I installed (no doubt for a very good reason, at the time) called Wild Tangent creates two stupid processes that sit in the background and do nothing. That thing’ll be uninstalled shortly, as I can’t even remember why I needed it.
This is all it really takes to keep a system running cleanly. Granted, it’s not for the feint of heart, but for us computer geeks it works very well.
Another bone I have to pick with adherents to the “reinstall everything” approach is the fact that these people often insist that erasing everything and reinstalling from a freshly-formatted drive is somehow necessary. It’s not. Deleting the contents of the Windoze directory, all its subdirectories (except the desktop directory, if you happen to keep a bunch of crap there like I do) and associated directories like Program Files is more than sufficient. It saves an assload of time that would otherwise be spent backing up and restoring data. And sometimes you can even leave Program Files untouched and reinstall your applications on top of their old directories and old preferences will be magically restored without you having to spend a lot of time tweaking them. It works more often than you might think.
I am careful about what goes on my machine. I run sys utils regularly. Etc.
If you have to clear out the hard drive and re-install, you are doing a lot of things wrong.
The hard drive I am using now still contains the original programs and system files (MSDOS 3.3) from my first XT clone. Just copied over and over as I upgraded systems. (They actually come in handy sometimes.)
I never do this. Of course, I usually get a new computer every year or so, that might have something to do with it.
I’ve had my current system (running WindowsXP) for about 15 months, and I have no performance problems at all. I had a computer that ran '98 that I used for about 2 and a half years which performed pretty well, too.
but we still have more to put in.
