Thread: Reformatting, how often should I do it?

Well, it's been a while since I got my new case, (summer 2009 to be exact). And while I haven't experienced any particularly major problems, I feel like I should reformat soon.

I just wanted to ask you guys how often you do this to your rigs, because I think I'm going to have to do so sometime this summer.

I typically do it once/year for my gaming rig... mainly because I am doing some sort of upgrade that requires it (motherboard, new hard drive, etc). Honestly, if you are not experiencing any problems, I don't recommend a reformat. It will likely not give you much benefit, and cause more stress than anything else.

If you like getting into a cycle, I would say every 8-12 months you should reformat a PC that gets daily use, just to clean out all of the crapware. I reformat my gaming rig more often because it is really just games installed on it.

I typically do my gaming rig once a year... or anytime a major hardware upgrade occurs, whichever is earlier. I'll be reloading my rig before QC this year and dragging it with me.

With Windows 7 now-a-days it doesn't make much a difference. On XP I would do it every 8 months, but I have yet to do it for Windows 7 for reasons that weren't major upgrade related.

Just redid mine with the new ssd, but before that I hadn't in about a year (win7).

Even with XP if you didn't install and uninstall stuff very often you could get away with not reformatting. I have an alienware laptop I use for nothing more than an RDP client and it's still running the original installation of XP that came on it 4.5 years ago. If you are constantly installing and uninstalling stuff though I was in the habit of nuking a machine at least once per year.

I am in the habit of re-installing only when I want to move what hard drive is the system drive (I try to keep it installed on the drive with the average amount of age, not the newest or the oldest). That and I re-install when my motherboard changes (aka chipset changes), but I have gotten away without doing that before....

And no I do not find ghost images worth while. Windows 7 is super fast installing if you install off of a USB drive, that and I grab all the latest drivers and stick them on the usb drive as well....