How messed up does Windows get before you usually reinstall?

MChief said:
On that note, don't fill NTFS or any other modern journaled filesystem (ext3, reiser, apple's funky bsd filesystem, etc) to more than 90% capacity :).
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Actually, FreeBSD (and I imagine Darwin and OS X, plus the rest of the *BSDs) won't let normal users fill an UFS (or UFS2) filesystem to more than 92% of capacity to avoid this.
 
HHunt said:
Actually, FreeBSD (and I imagine Darwin and OS X, plus the rest of the *BSDs) won't let normal users fill an UFS (or UFS2) filesystem to more than 92% of capacity to avoid this.
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Nice. NTFS and Reiser have options for this I think, but by default they'll let you fill the filesystems... for some reason.
 
I never reinstall Windows, or reformat. I believe that there is no reason to take such drastic measures. Keep up your rig as you go along, and there is no need.
 
MChief said:
Nice. NTFS and Reiser have options for this I think, but by default they'll let you fill the filesystems... for some reason.
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It's one of those small things I appreciate. :)
(It does have a few interesting effects, like how df shows negative amounts of free space if a partition is overfilled.)
 
So I guess most of you guys are content with upgrade/repair? You still have to install all the drivers and patches but it certainly is better than starting from scratch. There has only been one instance where a repair did not fix the problem.
 
MChief said:
I haven't reinstalled in years and years. In fact I think I haven't reinstalled since upgrading from W2K...

I really don't understand why/how people mess up their systems to the point of having to reinstall. Formatting is also a huge myth - the only reason you should ever need to format is if you've overfilled your NTFS drive and the MFT is getting oogly.

On that note, don't fill NTFS or any other modern journaled filesystem (ext3, reiser, apple's funky bsd filesystem, etc) to more than 90% capacity :).

I've upgraded motherboards, video cards, RAID'ed my system partition, de-RAID'ed it, no problems. If you have something causing a problem, just go into regedit and fix it. Any problem you have ever had, someone else has had it and probably fixed it, so just google your problems away. There are also tons of offline registry editors available, some for free, so if windows won't even boot you can usually get in.

I think if you have to reinstall winders every 6-12 months, especially if you "have" to format, you need to take a good look at what you're doing with your computer. Try laying off the russian pr0n sites. User error is the only thing that could cause that kind of damage, and if its happening over and over again, you're doing something wrong.

Occasionally, when your system dies/loses power/etc at an inopportune moment, the registry database files will become unreadable because they're not properly closed (ntfs isn't atomic... yet, but reiser4 is :) ). You'll get a message saying windows\system32\system is unreadable - for *THAT* you will have to re-install if chkdsk won't recover the file to a usable state - but thats about it. Of course, if you back your registry up occasionally, you won't have that problem either :).
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You can always change your MFT. I have too I have a 160 gig drive and about 8% unused. I got stuff from 1992 siting on my drive. No pr0n either.
 
GeForceX said:
CCleaner. Now that's awesome. :) Thanks.

-J.
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I f-ing love that app.

I'm at 20 months of my last Win2K reformat on my PII 350 384MB, 120GB/160GB - both rammed to death.

Locked down to death with ZA, protected by Norton, scanned, with Spybot and Ad Aware, and kept healthy with O&O's stealth mode.

It's time I built a monster though. RAID0 on the 80s, RAID1 on the 400s, and AMD 64 under the hood. ETA summer...
 
My windows XP installs normally will last a few months. Then again I do have a unattended install CD so I just pop that in let my Raptor do its thing and bam Im good to go in 20 mins. So its an easy feat :) I normally reinstall just for the sake of starting new and having everything clean/bug free
 
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