You've posted this question in the wrong forum, I'm afraid. Mods please move to Computer Hardware. If this helps you should only format your hard drive If you have a serious problem with your PC, (ie virus infection, PC not booting up or frequently crashing) or you want to upgrade your operating system.
Some friends reformat thier drives regularly, 2 or 3 times a year.Only takes a couple of hours and your back to a nice quick pc with no crap in the drives.
On the other hand, my PC at work has had NT4 on it for at least 5 years without a reinstall! However, I tend to average two reinstalls a year, although my WinME HCPC has been going just over a year without a reinstall (touch wood!). NT based OS's (NT, 2000, XP) tend to need less reinstalls than Win9x based ones (95, 98, ME).
because I do so much mucking about with software, I tend to rebuild my PC every couple of months. Saying that, I haven't rebuilt this one for about six months. Policy I work by is: House keep - defrag & get rid of the old crud you really don't need (demos etc) run regular systems checks. If it ain't broke don't fix it! Collin
Well im a bad example, but i have 2 machines, the hcpc has had xp re imstalled half a dozen times in 6 months, my working mucking about, surfing, nonsense machine has had ME running on it without serious hitch for nearly 3 years. ad
well its not exactly easy to reformat your system partition without reinstalling! I basically took it as read that you would automatically reformat anytime you reinstalled ad
Lynx, Thats fair enough, i think we know what we both were on about! But to the topic...... dkapit8, was there any specific problem you are trying to sort that prompted you to ask? ad