How messed up does Windows get before you usually reinstall?

S

Staples

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 18, 2001
Messages
7,978
Usually Windows will run fine for at least 6 months under heavy heavy use for me without anything really bad happening but usually 2-4 month within Windows, some minor thing happens. Sometimes it effects me, others not. Right now, everything works fine but I bought a WMP device and whenever WMP tries to copy high bit rate MP3s over to the player, wmpenc tries to convert them to WMA. It can convert high bit rate or unstandard WMA without a problem but with MP3s, it just does not like them. It will run, maybe even convert part of the song but just stops and the CPU runs 100%. The only thing you can do is kill the task. I can use other computers around the house to copy to the player but I somehow feel imperfect and have an urge to reinstall.

Reinstalling Windows is one of the least favorite things I want to do. It can easily take me a good 10 hours to get everything back to what it should be. Folders, installations, drivers, shortcuts, dev program settings, etc.

How many errors does Windows have to cause before the average person would decide to reinstall? It may not be such a chore for many people who are not involved in writing software but for me, it is a real chore.
 
I format before it even happens. Its normally because of another reason why I format but also because windows gets slower when its not been formattted in a while.

I'm normally upgraded 1-3 months all the time as well
 
Well well. This player is not limited to 160kbps WMA and 128kbps MP3 as I had previously though. If I drag songs over to it in explorer, it can play them just fine. This is great since it will not diminish my quality and make those small WMA voice files huge. Also, WMP syncronizes (sp) them by album so they are really a pain to navigate. I just want a list and copying them over to one dir does just that. I will do this from now on.

DOH: It will not play back the 20mbps WMA 9.1 voice files in their current form.
 
I don't reformat on any kind of regular basis, my main rig has been running the same W2K load for at least 3 years. WTF are you folks (people who reload frequently) doing to screw them up beyond fix/repairing on a regular basis?
 
Only when I royaly screw something up or It just gets so conjusted.


So far Ive been running xp pro 1 year and 6 months then reformatted. :D

I dont think win xp is too stable, I really rather have win 2k3.
 
I think it's usually leftover techies from the WIN98/ME era when reformatting was a way of life. Mine own XP Boxen has been running solid since its initial install 2 years ago... Proper maintenence and a solid knowlege of win2k/XP makes reformatting a thing of the dark ages.
 
I consider myself pretty good at fixing Windows but as I have said before, it usually lasts 8 months - year before something bad happens. I am a gamer and I am always installing beta drivers for the mainboard, video and sound. Something I do not do anymore is install beta MS software. I have been screwed over by beta MS crap so many times. With all the drivers and stuff I go through, I think they chip away at the OS little by little and then something major happens eventually.

My favorite is people who have illegal copies of Windows which have not been updated for years and they complain that they are having problems. My favorite of all times is those who complain that IE is so insecure. I see crap get in through IE once in a while but if you keep the PC up to date, it cuts down those incidents by a lot.
 
I've been running the same XP install for years with no re-install. I do a TON of software development on it, plus I use it for music, games, porn, etc... I just make sure it stays spyware and virus free, and that drivers and firmware stay up to date...

Your OS shouldn't "go bad". Reinstalling isn't the answer.
 
So far my XP install has lasted me a while, and if it continues like this I'll only have to reinstall if it decides to die after me meddling with the partition tables, or something. (For some reason, I seem to be able to goad windows into a permanent non-booting state merely by waving fdisk in its general direction.)

OTOH, it can be quicker to reinstall than to find a solution to some problems. (A guy in my class has an interesting example: Right click -> properties works with files, but is a complete no-op for directories. I'm sure there's a solution and I don't particularly want to know. It is however an example of how windows, even XP, pick up ... quirks as time goes by.)
 
HHunt said:
OTOH, it can be quicker to reinstall than to find a solution to some problems. (A guy in my class has an interesting example: Right click -> properties works with files, but is a complete no-op for directories. I'm sure there's a solution and I don't particularly want to know. It is however an example of how windows, even XP, pick up ... quirks as time goes by.)
Click to expand...
Unless you have good ghosted images, I doubt it... Most people tend to forget things like installing games that have 6+cds, downloading patches (OS, apps, games), skins, custom settings, add-ons, mod packs, and a partridge in a pear tree. :)

Most people would NEVER be able to replicate ALL the settings they had prior to the format. However, who needs good ghosted images if your reinstalling every couple of years? :)

 
Phoenix86 said:
Most people tend to forget things like installing games that have 6+cds, downloading patches (OS, apps, games), skins, custom settings, add-ons, mod packs, and a partridge in a pear tree. :)
Click to expand...
Haha, yes, it is the damn games that take forever to install. UT2004 is 6 CDs, BF;V is 3, CoD is 3 and the expansion is another 3 (game I love). Also I move my docs and temp IE files and others to another partition so C doesn't get fragmented to hell.

I also change a lot of setting with registry edit tools. Install a ton of programs and drivers.
 
Phoenix86 said:
Unless you have good ghosted images, I doubt it... Most people tend to forget things like installing games that have 6+cds, downloading patches (OS, apps, games), skins, custom settings, add-ons, mod packs, and a partridge in a pear tree. :)

Most people would NEVER be able to replicate ALL the settings they had prior to the format. However, who needs good ghosted images if your reinstalling every couple of years? :)

Click to expand...

Given a non-booting XP, the alternative can be "Dismantle computer, take harddrive, drive to somewhere with another computer and internet, research, add drive to other computer, fix[1], pull out HD, drive back, put computer back together". It's in these cases reinstalling really looks good. :)
(Yet another reason everyone should have at least two computers. )

[1] If at all possible. Sometimes it's just ... dead.
Also, fixing a windows installation other than the one you're booting has it's own share of challenges.
 
Phoenix86 said:
I don't reformat on any kind of regular basis, my main rig has been running the same W2K load for at least 3 years. WTF are you folks (people who reload frequently) doing to screw them up beyond fix/repairing on a regular basis?
Click to expand...

I've often wondered the same thing. In the days of Win 95 and Win 98, reinstalls were a necessity sometimes. With W2K and up that just isn't the case, unless one really screws around with their system or just doesn't know what they are doing.
 
ThomasE66 said:
I've often wondered the same thing. In the days of Win 95 and Win 98, reinstalls were a necessity sometimes. With W2K and up that just isn't the case, unless one really screws around with their system or just doesn't know what they are doing.
Click to expand...

Let's just say that there are a few unexpected ways to make a windows (2000, at least) install die without touching it.
(Installing with a disk configuration that puts your system on an unusually high drive letter, removing the disk that occupied the low letters, and then writing some partition information from another OS, for instance. I suspect it may have overwritten the signature windows used to link drive letters to partitions, resetting my system partition to c: and royally screwing up everything that used the old drive letter. Such as explorer.exe and cmd.exe . Still, I didn't really do anything unusual with fdisk.)

Happened to me several years ago, but I somehow doubt it's a common problem. :D
Also, I guess this can be called "screwing around with my system".
 
HHunt said:
Happened to me several years ago, but I somehow doubt it's a common problem.
Click to expand...

Happend to me twice last week.

Seriously, though, my current copy of XP has been running now for two years. No hiccups, no problems beyond the ones that I have caused myself. Same thing with 2k. I see no reason to format / reinstall on a regular basis (ok, there probably are SOME reasons). It's almost to the point that OS problems aren't going to be the OS, they are going to be hardware / user related.
 
I average about 3 months between reformats on my main rig (my laptop). The thing is, I load so much junk onto it, as well as beta everything, it just slows down after a while. I've nevere actually borken it so bad as to have to reformat. For me, it's almost enjoyable. Then again, I make fancy unattended setup discs. They install all the latest drivers, as well as most of my tweaks and programs, all without my intervention. Put it in and let it go. In fact, I'll be doing that in a bout a week. After all, I last redid my comp the day after Christmas, and I am TheUberGeek
 
theubergeek said:
I average about 3 months between reformats on my main rig (my laptop). The thing is, I load so much junk onto it, as well as beta everything, it just slows down after a while. I've nevere actually borken it so bad as to have to reformat. For me, it's almost enjoyable. Then again, I make fancy unattended setup discs. They install all the latest drivers, as well as most of my tweaks and programs, all without my intervention. Put it in and let it go. In fact, I'll be doing that in a bout a week. After all, I last redid my comp the day after Christmas, and I am TheUberGeek
Click to expand...

A true ubergeek would have a separate test machine for all that beta crap ;)
 
Actually, I have 2 test machines, plus I use VMWare and Virtual PC extensively. Sometimes it's just more fun to put it on my main rig and see how well it really works.
 
theubergeek said:
Actually, I have 2 test machines, plus I use VMWare and Virtual PC extensively. Sometimes it's just more fun to put it on my main rig and see how well it really works.
Click to expand...

I was teasing you.
 
I haven't formatted since I got my new HDD last spring. Since I now have a domain, the load and junk off my computer is distributed across 3 boxen. I have my server, my test bed, and my main rig. Taking all the testing, and screwing around with settings and software to a new box tends to help keep my main rig from getting all icky. :p
 
S1nF1xx said:
I haven't formatted since I got my new HDD last spring. Since I now have a domain, the load and junk off my computer is distributed across 3 boxen. I have my server, my test bed, and my main rig. Taking all the testing, and screwing around with settings and software to a new box tends to help keep my main rig from getting all icky. :p
Click to expand...
Testing on your gaming rig makes the baby jesus cry. :(

;)

 
I don't have to reinstall windows too often because its messed up...and at this point, I know XP well enough that it takes an act of God for me to be unable to repair it. That said, I find reformatting useful for an entirely different purpose - it acts to weed all the shit on my computer that I don't need. I'm sure we all have done this; you install program X, use it occasionally, and then forget it exists, but its still there, taking up space. A reformat ensures that crap like this doesn't happen. Besides, it only like 3-4 hours to get an XP box almost 100% back up and running, assuming that you have all your patches and stuff already dloaded...
 
DamienThorn said:
I don't have to reinstall windows too often because its messed up...and at this point, I know XP well enough that it takes an act of God for me to be unable to repair it. That said, I find reformatting useful for an entirely different purpose - it acts to weed all the shit on my computer that I don't need. I'm sure we all have done this; you install program X, use it occasionally, and then forget it exists, but its still there, taking up space. A reformat ensures that crap like this doesn't happen. Besides, it only like 3-4 hours to get an XP box almost 100% back up and running, assuming that you have all your patches and stuff already dloaded...
Click to expand...

That's the only reason I ever reformat a machine, for a fresh start :)
 
ThomasE66 said:
That's the only reason I ever reformat a machine, for a fresh start :)
Click to expand...
It is fun to format sometimes for sport. I like having a fresh pallet to work with. I'm getting the itch to start over. I think I'm going to find a nice new theme and start with that. :p
 
<smartass>
Yep, nothing like a fresh pallet. :D
(It's "palette". Blame the french.)
</smartass>

Seriously, formatting is a golden opportunity to get rid of all the cruft that seems to accumulate on. At least if you are selective with what you copy out first, unlike me.
 
I had to reformat windows only once in the last 5 years, That once was for some win95 virus, but nothing more. I just somehow find how to fix things without needing to format. Good for me.
 
The only time I find myself reinstalling is normally around the same time as major upgrades. There's just something about a fresh install of XP on a pile of new hardware. It just goes together hand in hand.

 
this is sorta off topic, but its related and one of you guys should be able to help me out (hopefully). Im gonna reinsall in afew days, and my main hd is a SATA drive, i have not had a floppy drive in my machine since the last time i installed windows, and i would really like to avoid putting one in just for the install. Is there anyway i can add the drivers to my windows cd, or can i put the drivers on a cd and load the cd during the install? Ive read about making an unattended cd, and i could do that, but i was wondering if there are any other options ive got.
 
zerogt86 said:
this is sorta off topic, but its related and one of you guys should be able to help me out (hopefully). Im gonna reinsall in afew days, and my main hd is a SATA drive, i have not had a floppy drive in my machine since the last time i installed windows, and i would really like to avoid putting one in just for the install. Is there anyway i can add the drivers to my windows cd, or can i put the drivers on a cd and load the cd during the install? Ive read about making an unattended cd, and i could do that, but i was wondering if there are any other options ive got.
Click to expand...

Unattended CDs require that you have another method of booting than the CD. I know for a fact that you can put the answer file on a floppy disk, but haven't tried it on a USB drive...though now that you raise the issue, I feel as though I should try to just to see what happens... :p
 
I'm so patient that I'd let my whole main/gaming PC finally crash into a useless piece of silicon metal. Then again you could say patience really means laziness.

My main/gaming PC was going strong for 2 years. Until I installed SP2 which pretty much screwed up a lot of things. But I lived with it. I adapted and made way.

Suddenly Windows Media Player doesn't work. Playing certain mp3 files and videos won't work. I was annoyed, but I found a solution-- use another player. That involves using a crappy player that had no "repeat" on which irritated me further. But I lived with it. I adapted and made way.

Then downloading some new programs and patches and so on fubared my computer's performance. I don't know why. I didn't bother uninstalling, but I did live with it. I adapted and made way.

Now my PC games don't run smoothly. What happened to my super 125 FPS that I used to get in Quake 3? Hell, I lived with my 60 FPS and sometimes dropped 15 FPS speed. I lived with that too and made way.

Suddenly the computer would randomly reboot after running certain programs. Crap, I say to myself. I don't bother running them anymore. I lived with it and made way.

I wanted to produce some songs and suddenly it won't work smoothly at all. Sounds were so jerky due to some strange high CPU usage. Then suddenly some loud scratching noises hit the speakers and everything gone haywire. I learned to deal with not producing for the rest of the year. I lived with it and moved on.

Gee, not much to do, huh?

Well, there's AIM and MSN and such. And browsing on the web. I installed Firefox for fun and didn't like it because it crashed a lil' too much. Well, I learned-- don't try Firefox or any new stuff on a piece of crap computer. AIM couldn't direct connect with other people anymore. So I learned how to deal with FTP'ing and uploading to free image sites just so someone could see my cool Quake 3 score with 64% railgun accuracy at 25 FPS or something. I lived with that and moved on.

Then gee, whatyaknow? Wordpad and notepad won't work. I had to do my homework somehow, so I used some html editor and saved it in that format. I lived with that and moved on.

My desktop became so cluttered that you can't navigate it around anymore or even move files on it. So I thought of increasing my resolution from 1024 x 768 to 1600 x 1200 and wow, I was saved by resolutions! For a week anyway. It got so cluttered that I basically right-clicked and pointed to "new folder" and moved everything to that folder and kept adding clutter. I lived with that and kept moving on.

And yay, just last night, I finally got a corrupted OS warning. I'm gonna format it tonight. :D

<3

-J.
 
Actually, yes. It answers the topic "How messed up does Windows get before you usually reinstall?" Though I got lil' too detailed.

-J.
 
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 :).
 
DamienThorn said:
Unattended CDs require that you have another method of booting than the CD. I know for a fact that you can put the answer file on a floppy disk, but haven't tried it on a USB drive...though now that you raise the issue, I feel as though I should try to just to see what happens... :p
Click to expand...

You can put it all on a bootable CD and it will slam away. I forget how to do it exactly, but google has the answer:)
 
I reformat probably once every 6-8 months, just because there are enough programs that I fiddle with that don't have proper uninstallers that it would end up being more of a hassle for me to google/regedit/dosboot all of this crap away than to just re-format. That being said, the only reason I can possibly stand doing this is because I have all of my music/movies/pictures/drivers/small programs/documents on an external drive. This makes is really not too much of a pain at all to re-install windows/my games/etc.
 
insanarchist said:
I reformat probably once every 6-8 months, just because there are enough programs that I fiddle with that don't have proper uninstallers that it would end up being more of a hassle for me to google/regedit/dosboot all of this crap away than to just re-format. That being said, the only reason I can possibly stand doing this is because I have all of my music/movies/pictures/drivers/small programs/documents on an external drive. This makes is really not too much of a pain at all to re-install windows/my games/etc.
Click to expand...

I keep my OS and core programs on a 20GB partition, this makes moving/copying it etc to a new drive or array very easy. I used to hate partitioning because sometimes you couldn't use all your available space, but space is such a cheap commodity these days that it really doesn't matter as long as you partition out properly, and keep your content offline on DVD :)
 
Since Win2k and Winxp have come out I haven't reformanted. No need, worst case scenerio is that I repair the OS.

My Win2k Machine has never been reformated, been running 5 Years on the same install, heck My friend ran the beta install for 3 years with out problems. One of mine Winxp machines has been running 2 years on same install, one was run in OS repair 3 months ago after I upgraded the mobo and cpu.

I use FireFox
CCleaner
adaware.

System runs like a million dollars.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top