While I agree in theory, it’s been my experience that a reformat needs to happen. Even for a relatively routine reinstall (like I generally do once or twice a year to clean out the crap. Some day I’ll get an imaging program and start using that instead.)
Agreed. A reformat may not be explicitly necessary, but it’s still considered best practice.
Photoshop tells you to dedicate a scratch disk to it, or if you don’t have a separate drive, to dedicate a partition so it has room to “think” when it is manipulating multi MBs of images.
Especially in this day and age. From what I’ve read, there’s a growing trend of spyware and viruses that need reformatting (rather than just OS re-installation) to truly get rid of. (I can’t quite remember where I read it, or I’d provide a cite.)
IME its about 20% of all badly virus infected machines cannot be cleaned by normal means. About 50% would still be more easily achieved by a clean install.