Ive been using an old dell inspiron 1200 notebook at work to play pandora, check email, and browse youtube for years now. lately ive started to have some minor "old OS" issues. nothing major, just minor slow downs, stuttering, memory leaks, that kind of stuff. i was thinking about doing a clean install on the machine to bring back its pep when a thought occurred: how old is "old" for a particular installation of an operating system? i got this laptop in 2005 as a "refurbished" unit. its still running the original windows XP home installation it had when i got it and for the most part its been solid. so, bit-tech, how old is YOUR installation? and im not talking about that commodore that sits in the closet and only comes out as a conversation piece. im talking about real, usable, regularly exercised machines. my dell has 7 years under its belt
The oldest in our house is on an offline htpc i built around xmas time. I have a dead gaming laptop that came with xp home so that was transferred on to the htpc. The first thing I noticed is that xp doesn't support IR remote controls, luckily I found a way around it although getting it to work can still be patchy. I also recently upgraded my mums old pc and thought the os needed updated from xp. I've had a copy of vista that was unused so she got that. Despite what people say its decent enough after the service packs are installed.
I hardly ever re-install an OS after the initial build (unless I was forced to by a problem). I've never noticed stuff slowing down either. I think it depends how you use your PC and what you do to keep it in good shape. I've had this OS install since the rig was built in November.
i never reinstall my os, if i need to do it, it is usually on a different hd to see whats actually causing an issue. when i change to a larger drive, i just clone the current install to the new drive. so my current desktop os is the original win7 install, as soon as it was available, but with all the updates
Wow this will be interesting. I reinstall mine about every six months and like doing fresh installs. I have a hard drive with all my back ups as in drivers and so forth.
I just don't see the point. My machine is every bit as fast now as it was when built. Seems like a waste of time to me.
Only re-install when hardware changes cause windows to throw a utter fit. Win7 is pretty good at adapting to new hardware but sometimes the world will break for it. I rather spring clean the app's I don't use, and run a decent clean up and De-frag (non SSD). Longest OS install is my Workstation Win7 is been cloned from drive to drive since 2009
Well, my dad still has a PC running on Windows 98. He uses it for writing and storing important documents on Word 97, and keeps it disconnected from the internet. Computer still works like a charm. Sent from my Orange San Francisco using Tapatalk
On my main rig I have a 6 month old install of 7, started again when I got the SSD. I also have a 486DX2 66MHz with a working copy of MS-DOS 6.22 on it, which up until a few years back got fired up fairly regularly for some old school early to mid 90s gaming. The GPU is a Tseng Labs ET4000 and the sound card is a Sound Blaster 16. It still works flawlessly and boots so quickly.
Probably a year and a half on my main PC as that's when my HDD died. SSD will be fitted so reinstall today. I usually do one about every year. Netbook, I've been trying many different OSes and have settled on EasyPeasy for the moment, so that's about 2 weeks. 2 years would be a long time for me.
About half a year on this my desktop and around a year on my laptop. My laptop will be reinstalled shortly though as the harddrive has been making that dreaded "click of impending death" sound for a while now and I've just ordered a replacement from eBay. I mostly reinstall my OS with hardware changes, or if the computer really NEEDS it.
I have a Milenium edition of windows on a laptop, its quicker to drive to shops to see if they have items in stock than boot it up though
2 days . Just dismantled my mATX box, switched to backup ITX box with new installation, hopefully my warecooled Bitfenix Prodigy box will be there in less in month. Then i will have a new install on that too.
I used to reinstall often but got fed up having to reinstall all programs and configuring how I like it so I did it and took a backup image. Now I stoppped Ive not noticed problems that force me to reinstall gladly
Just looking at windows update..first update when installed was 29/10/2009. So nearly 3 years, often thought about re-installing it but I don't get any errors, crashes or bsod.....so what's the point, if it ain't broke don't fix it !
2 years under its belt for my Kubuntu. But the windows install is regularly reinstalled my apps are on another HDD so its no problem to reinstall OS now and again for Win. Is actually only about 4 weeks old just now!
4/5 years, Vista. Xubuntu a few months old on my notebook - mainly 'cause I'm still learning about linux and it's easier to do a re-boot than fix any problems I make in the terminal...
I used to do it every 6 months or so when windows got a bit too bloated, now it's about once a year, or when something seriously goes wrong, or I upgrade something that would require a fresh install.
