I don’t do it just for fun, as you guys seem to imply. I do if it’s necessary to get the registry to work properly or when putting in a new HD.
XP Home is very fast for me & works great.
Well, I have an IBM Thinkpad that is over two years old. It has Win 98, and has always run crappy because I got it from my school and they put software on it that it should not run (like Maple 6 and Solidworks 2000.) I would pruge that, but if I uninstall anything the school put on, I might not get it back. ANd I need a lot of those programs. So, unfortunatly, it really won;t get flushed out until I graduate.
My new PC, however, I just built this past summer with win XP. I am very careful abotu what goes on it, so I might never need to purge, I run Ad-Aware and Norton, both of which (to my happines) never turn up anything.
I usually reformat and re-install about every 18 months or so. You can usually tell because the OS takes longer to start up. I use RegClean, Ad Aware all the time to remove unneeded stuff and clear out the Temp files. Everything important is on CD-RW so that if the disk fails we won’t loose it. This next time though I also am going to Ghost the installation as that makes re-installing super easy and quick.
I have an interesting phenomenon. I have a PI 70 mhz running on windows xp. I also have an AMD XP 1700 running xp.
When I forget to purge the amd machine, its a toss up as to which is faster…
I’ve never deleted and reinstalled my OS on my machine. I’ve had to reinstall over it’s remains a few times when some silly program goes ballistic all across my HD, mind you.
I use Win98SE
When the BSOD becomes a more familiar sight than one’s own naughty bits, it’s time for tabula rasa.
I never have done it unless it was absolutly neccesary, however I do upgrade my MB/Proccesser every 6 months or so. I copy the old HDD to a new, larger HDD and reformat/reinstal the old HDD as my OS Drive.
My former roomate used to reformat and reinstall every 3 days or so, but he used some type of utility to automatically reinstall all drivers and SW. He was VERY OCD by the way.
I have a 6 year old 133 mhz PC running Windows 95, which I have never reinstalled, although I do run defrag every few months or so. I also very rarely add new programs.
I occasionally had to reinstall OS 9 on my old iMac. One time AOL just screwed it up so badly, I felt it was the only thing to do. (I am not as savvy with OS 9 as I should, maybe a more able Mac person could have fixed it without a clean install.) Now I am using OS X on my G4 PowerMac, and so far, it’s smooth sailing. I don’t know if I’ll reinstall or purge or whatever, I guess I’ll have to check my OS X books. (OS X is Unix-based.)
On my Win98 machine, I personally have NEVER purged and reinstalled. NEVER. But others did it for me. I don’t claim to be the most computer savvy person out there.
I used to love installing new oddball programs. I thought, “That’s the fun of having a PC—you get to install weird freebie shit on it, just to see what it does!” But that was a bad idea. One time the PC just failed to boot properly. After behaving relatively OK it suddenly decided that it would not longer work. I tried to reinstall Windows but it wouldn’t let me do it. I took it into the shop. They said that the registry was screwed up (and also some RAM had gone bad) and so they fixed all of that up for me. I hasten to add, I did run defrag and scandisk regularly on this PC.
About a year later my Win98 Machine got everything purged and reinstsalled the second time, when a friend upgraded it. I knew that it had probably gotten messed up again by then so I asked my friend to do a reinstall of Windows. He said that Win98 was in abysmal condition. I told him, “I figured as much.” He reinstalled everything, and it ran OK for a while, but now I am afraid to install anything. My PC guru friend said (like many of the rest of you have said) to to be very careful about installing new programs. But where do you draw the line? I can live without every little crackpot freeware game that I see on download.com, but some programs are essential to me, and are the reason I own a computer to begin with. And when I install them, the PC runs funkier and funkier. What is the point of this?
is there somewhere a step by step guide to purge my computer. i have a pent. 3 dell that runs winME