How Many Times Do You Reinstall Windows In A Year - There goes some useful tips about it.

I reinstall it at least twice a year. Not on my PC but on my little brothers. He always does something to screw up his PC. The problem is, that every time he does so, it won't just Windows that I'll have to reinstall, but all other programs as well. Which takes me about a full day every time he screws his PC up.

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I honestly can say that I have only reinstalled windows maybe once or twice before. It's just that I don't really get too many viruses on my computer, so reinstalling windows, in most cases, isn't really an option or something that I feel needs to be done.

What I will say is that I think Windows is an awful OS. I have a mac at my sisters house, and it rules. It gets no viruses, has so many awesome little programs (Garage ban, photo booth, that it really puts Windows in a toilet. Plus, my sister has had it for a year or so now and it has had less problems then my Windows OS computer has had. If I had enough moola, I'd most likely go with a Mac </offtopic>

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So we all agree that Windows needs to be reinstalled at some point; some people do it when they catch a virus, others (like me) when there's too much stuff on the hard drive to even consider cleaning it up. But sometime Windows just acts up for no reason and a reinstall in mandatory. This is because Windows is an expensive flawed product.
I find Vista to be more reliable than XP even if most users don't like it. I got used to Vista and I only reinstalled it once since I bought my laptop (last year). I did it because, as I said, I had to much stuff on my 200Gb hard drive (I know it may not seem a lot to some of you, but I'm really messy at times) so I put in my recovery disk (which I unfortunately lost since then) and deleted everything.
XP is al little more needy when it comes to stability; it may require third party software like System Mechanic or TuneUp Utilities to keep it going, otherwise it may kindly ask for a reinstall crashing like test dummies in concrete walls.
When I had XP I reinstalled it every 3 months or so. Now with Vista I reinstalled only once six months ago. None of this options is in the poll so I choose not to vote.

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nitish wrote
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I reinstall (restore) windows almost every 2-3 months. What about you??? Seeing the title some would say "I do it daily" and some others "How to reinstall?". Let's see the poll results. Linuxers, see you in other post.

Reinstalling windows is a daily chore for the students studying computers. They have to switch a lot of softwares, compilers etc etc. Windows as we know, will not tolerate a whole lot of (Un)installations and will ultimately slow down the whole system. This is not the case with Linux. Just consider this, I installed Red Hat WS 3(the older version which was lurking around with me) a year ago, full installation (4GB). The boot time initially was terribly slow. Because by default Linux runs everything during startup, even the sendmail daemon(it takes around 10 seconds) which is not needed for normal use. Then I read articles about linux and disabled all those stuff. The change was just superb and still haven't reinstalled it. Back to windows..

I actually wanted to give you some tips on reinstalling windows. Especially the professionals, say web developers using dreamweaver, flash, local apache, php. They setup nice settings to suit there needs. After this why reinstall??? Forget those students, what if your system gets virus, ok you're using the anti*** but they don't always help. For example some days ago my system was hacked by some .scr scripts. The result, my whole folders in root of every drive(even C:) was hidden and also creating there respective blank folders(basically .scr extension with folder images). I knew it immediately because I always keep the settings "Show hidden files", "show system files", "show extension of known file types" checked. Amazingly the script took back its work after rebooting. But now I wasn't able to see hidden files and extension. It did all sorts of registry edits. I had to reinstall... Oops again off track, now back to the tips...

Reinstalling Windows (The good way):

First method:This one is a common one. You install some software like Norton Ghost and make up a backup of freshly installed system (Fresh windows with essential softwares installed) and burn it to dvd. Now whenever the system crashes you just restore it with dvd. Check those tons of articles for more info on this.

Second method: I worked out this trick which I thought will never work. The basics are same you install fresh copy of windows with essential softwares like antivirus. Now you archive everything in your C: drive like .zip(it takes time) and either move the archive to another drive or burn it to dvd. NOw when odd thing happens you just pop in some live cd distros of linux which support the fat partition viewing and format the C: drive(you can use win cd's fdisk for formating) and restore it with the archive which you placed in other drive or dvd. Voila! Isn't that fantastic. It saves you money buying software like Norton Ghost. Any opinions, help request about this trick are welcome.

If you don't want to reinstall windows there are some rollback softwares available which restore windows to previous state in case of power failure (hoping this is not your case) or other problems. There is also one software (anybody point out that please) which disregards any changes during a session including folders created or softwares installed. This one is very useful for internet cafes.

That's enough from me. Now its your turn to tell everything you wanted to about this topic.
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Thank you for your information.
I reinstall more than a year.

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The only time i re-install windows is when I'm upgrading or have a virus of some sort that just screws over my pc.

But I have done it closely before but that was when I was getting a load of viruses, but other then that I would only really do it every two years about if nothing goes wrong. I too am using programs to clean my registry and speedup my pc so I don't really need to worry about my pc going slower.

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