Windows XP: Reasons behind reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows OS?
- 8/21/09 2:39 PM
Why Reformat and Reinstall
by nonpo - 8/14/09 6:37 PM In reply to: Reasons behind reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows OS? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
My personal thinking on this subject is twofold.
One level, I think why not reformat, as everything should be backed up. When I suggest the reinstall I often get responses about files, esp. family pictures. This is usually the first indication of a problem. These Items should already be backed up.
On a deeper level, in addition to the potential of a damaged Kernel, there are numerous files that are running constantly in the back ground keeping everything functioning in the computer. Damage to any of these files can cause problems, which can literally take hours and numerous reboots to track down. Often that problem is never completely tracked down and the computer needs more work soon because it 'doesn't run like it used to'.
A fresh install removes all traces of old programs and screen savers and any other 'helper' programs that have been installed (or not completely uninstalled) over the computer's life span.
One word of warning with complete system reformats! There are times when a hardware problem that was not detected previously will become evident upon reinstall. This could due to many issues with that hardware itself, but it can prevent it from reinstalling. On the plus side, I have often found a hardware problem with reformatting the system and prevented a future return for service and more importantly a failure at a 'bad time' (i.e. working on work or school project at 1am.)
Long and short, when you reformat it takes less time, eliminates the largest number of potential problems and rewards the computer owner with a 'factory fresh' computer that runs like it did when it came out of the box. Of course you have to reinstall the programs you use, but you also get rid of all the programs you don't use that are wasting computer resources. IMHO it is often the best way to go, not a 'last ditch effort' to repair the problem.
Reformatting HD & Reinstalling Windows
by john.ford1 - 8/14/09 6:38 PM In reply to: Reasons behind reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows OS? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Stephanie,
Some years ago our HD's were not the best and they would develop bad sectors and bad sectors on the HD plate causes many problems. When the heads of the HD get to a bad sector they cannot record anything and simply the bad sector does not allow for anything to happen at all except to cause errors to appear on your computer's screen. Another reason that many still choose to reformat and reinstall Windows OS is that they are a bit lazy and do not defrag their drives on a regular basis. Defrag your drive means to clean up and reorganize all the data on your HD. Just think for a moment about your HD, all it is a repository holding all the information you saved on yoru computer. As time progresses and you change and rewrite the information by deleting, rewriting, adding to, and other changes that can and do occur to data over time, the HD becomes very slow as it has to do too much work to find all the bits and pieces of say a larger document with many pages. When you first created that document all the pages are together; but over time they become separated by other data and so forth. Reformatting the drive and then reinstalling Windows (OS) starts you all over again and your the user can place all the info you want on the HD and things will be neat a clean all together again. You will actually notice an increase in speed as things are all together. Defragging helps do teh same thing without having to reformat and reinstall the OS. I hope I did not confuse you however it can get confusing as many "gurus" will say you MUST reformat and reinstall the OS. Remember that reformatting your HD will erase all your information and make it go away and you will never be able to retrieve it; unless you have a complete backup with everything on it. Sometimes backup programs tend to forget things which to the program may not seem important but to us it is. Hence we did not save this particular data and reformatting made it go away and then all we have accomplished is to become very frustrated especially if a computer "guru" said we must. While there are valid reasons for reformatting the drive but nowadays I cannot think of a good one while I am writing this advice. Defrag and you will be much better off, make sure to backup EVERYTHING on a regular basis using say a USB HD which are relatively inexpensive and reliable as well as speedy. Have a nice day and don't fret about reformat & reinstall.
Lazy
by geofbrewer - 8/15/09 1:08 PM In reply to: Reformatting HD & Reinstalling Windows by john.ford1Not everyone understands the concept behind defrag, or its importance. We passed out routine housekeeping instructions to our customers. One customer took out their hard drive. They were defragging once a week.
Hopefully this clears things up a bit
by hanaleia - 8/14/09 6:42 PM In reply to: Reasons behind reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows OS? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
You reformat the hard drive and reinstall the OS in the face of a problem or obstacle that may possibly take a very long time to solve or is just impossible to fix. Reformatting and reinstalling is good because it removes and gets rid of all the old problems like spyware, malwhere, viruses, corrupted files, missing system files,etc, anything that is causing the computer to not behave the way it should and replaces them with fresh, new, clean files that are hopefully not experiencing any problems. Think of it as providing a clean slate to start over with. However, if you are not experiencing difficulties or extremely serious problems with your computer there is no reason to do this as reformatting and reinstalling destroys all the information on the hard drive and there are several steps that should be taken before a step like this is performed.
Re-Installing; It is a personal decision.
by lakephillip - 8/14/09 6:46 PM In reply to: Reasons behind reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows OS? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
There are several factors to take into account before a reinstall.
Like (This weeks) question. If it is a hardware problem, obviously a re-install wouldn't help. But I personally liken it to Spring Cleaning. When you re-install with thought you can avoid installing a program that you don't want and need.In certain circumstances, a reinstall can make your computer act as if it were new. Reasons vary, but good examples, are corruption because of malware/spyware...Accidentally, permanently deleting an irreplaceable file, and aren't up for a programming challenge.....Windows Restore won't solve your problem. Your computer is going so very slow for inexplicable reasons, and you are at a loss......You want to rule out a hardware problem.
And remember before doing a re-install back up all your documents....Photos, Music, Videos, E-mail Storage, etc.......
Make sure you have all your important drivers, and have program launchers available for when you re-install your programs.
I personally re-install 4-6 times a year. I have all my documents permanently on a 1TB Drive, and Have Win7/Vista Dual Boot. My friend never re-installs except when there is a hardware breakdown, and he says "If It ain't broken, don't try to fix it.
Why not wipe in addition to doing a format?
by CrescentBeach - 8/14/09 7:00 PM In reply to: Re-Installing; It is a personal decision. by lakephillipMost responses that are in favor or doing a clean reinstall only talk about reformatting. Why not go ALL the way and do a wipe and then repartition/reformat? That's what I do. The wiping process is automated, gives me complete certainty that I'm starting with the HD in the best possible condition before Windows is laid down, and usually only adds an hour or two to the process. There are plenty of free HD wiping utilities available.
I agree completely with others who've said there's no substitute for starting fresh, especially if you're using an OS like XP that's had multiple service packs released. Everything I've ever read indicates that there are clear advantages to installing a slipstreamed copy of Windows (i.e. one that's had the service packs merged into it on a new CD) rather than installing windows off the original CD and then relying on Windows Update to deal with all the fixes and patches.
Wiping the HDD
by geofbrewer - 8/15/09 1:13 PM In reply to: Why not wipe in addition to doing a format? by CrescentBeachHow many systems do you have?
I reformatted my hard drive and restored my hp system
by jfordorl - 8/14/09 6:48 PM In reply to: Reasons behind reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows OS? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
My system was three years plus old and began to exhibit the inability to boot into windows after a power outage while the computer was in the process of shutting down for the night. I also had a lot of installed and deleted trial software on it and thus the registry was full of crap. BTW, I DO NOT believe it safe to use registry cleaners as they more often than not remove needed dll's, etc along with the crap. Anyway, I decided to do a full system restore and let the hp restore software reformat the 'C' partition. I decided to only reinstall the software which I really use frequently. My computer is now MUCH faster, and rid of all the seldom used software which I had installed previously. BTW, I did loose 1 month's digital photos which I had not yet backed up to a removeable hard drive. It is such a shame that much digital photography will be lost to the future because people fail to back up adequately! I usually manually back up My Documents including music, photos, databases, etc monthly. Bottom line: my computer is much faster, cleaner, and running fine again. Do I recommend doing this regularly, probably not. I only did because I needed to, but am glad I did under the circumstances.
To use a rather odd analogy...
by Zorched - 8/14/09 6:50 PM In reply to: Reasons behind reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows OS? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
You computer is often like a bachelor's neglected kitchen sink. As time goes on, dishes pile into it and it gets fuller and fuller. Sometimes someone makes a half-hearted attempt to empty it into the dishwasher and add a little Drain-o (analogous to your uninstall utilities and the CCleaner like applications) but stuff just keeps piling up. Eventually it gets so bad you can't use it anymore, the drain gets stopped up and it just gets foul.
This is what happens to windows as time goes on and we as users install software on our machines. Stuff gets jammed in the system directories there the OS places its stuff, and quite often doesn't get removed correctly when uninstalled. Software that we don't use or try once may not get uninstalled at all, and just sit there clogging up the system. When you install a program, it places files into the windows directories which that program thinks should be there. These programs then make changes to windows' centralized configuration database- known as the registry. Since the system loads the registry at bootup and regularly rescans it as you use your computer, the bigger it is and the more clogged it is, the slower your system will become. Your computer will actually run slower than the day you bought it.
Reinstalling your OS is like dumping the contents of and the aforementioned sink into a dumpster and installing a new one. Everything starts over from scratch without all the extra creepy crawlies involved. It brings it back to a 'clean' state where you can then only install what you need. I've had people say, "Oh my God, it's like I have a brand new computer! And here I was going to go buy a new one instead!"
...Which lasts about 2 days until the kids get a hold of it again...
Then it begins the spiral all over. The key is to not install questionable programs and keep unnecessary programs to a minimum If you do install programs just to try them out, uninstall them if you're not going to use them again. Every once in a while using a cleanup utility like CCleaner or one of the others is a good idea. I would recommend that you have someone knowledgeable with those types of utilities looking over your shoulder the first time or so because you can if not careful do more harm than good. These will extend the time needed between reinstall cycles, but won't completely remove the need for them.
Overall, and in short, it's done to make the system run faster and to remove the lurking unknowns from the system that might be a performance or stability risk to the overall functioning of the OS.
Some words of warning though. Should you get the urge to purge, make sure that you have ALL THE ORIGINAL discs that came with your computer first. Make sure that the most recent drivers are downloaded and burned to a CD-R. And most of all, MAKE SURE YOUR DATA IS BACKED UP SOMEWHERE SAFE. As in, not on the computer, but on DVD-Rs or CD-Rs somewhere. If you don't know where all the stuff is ferreted away on the system, have a Geek help. There's nothing more heart-wrenching than having a like-new high-performing machine again, but realizing you just lost the pictures of the first 3 years of little Johnny's life.
Right On
by PsychGen - 8/22/09 8:33 AM In reply to: To use a rather odd analogy... by ZorchedADMIN we could use a thumbs~up\thumbs~down button in these threads...
Just a thought...*rolleyes*
Just getting a fresh start
by totalturtlefan - 8/14/09 6:50 PM In reply to: Reasons behind reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling Windows OS? by Lee Koo (ADMIN)
Often the operating system gets 'cluttered' as a result of installation of software, removal of software, updates and the like. At times these things don't play well together and can cause the system to have some significant functioning issues. At other times it is just like a desk that is cluttered to the point it becomes inefficient. Reformatting and reinstalling the OS (Windows) restores the computer back to its original state and gets rid of the clutter and incompatibility issues and the machine functions much quicker and more effeciently.
This approach to solving problems can be effective but time consuming and presents the potential of lost data if everything isn't backed up well. In addition, many of the programs we have on our machines have been downloaded, so if you don't have those activation keys or the company is gone, so is your program.
This isn't a ritual that should be performed regularly, only if the machine is having problems that are insufferable and can't be solved in a more effective fashion.
to format or not to format that is the question
by puppadave - 8/14/09 7:36 PM In reply to: Just getting a fresh start by totalturtlefanHi kids...
here is an old trick that i use when ever my "Home brew" machine starts to act up.... I clean out the crap....bear with me....
1. restart machine as it boots up hit F8 ... it will show you a screen that will give you several choices.. with the "Cursor Pad" arrows choose SAFEMODE COMMAND PROMPT
2. Log on as Administrator
3. go to the command prompt (Type) CD\ (enter)
4. at C: (type in carefully) del(space)index.dat(space)/s (enter)
your system will then dispay a long laundry list of "stuff" it is deleting from your system....note that this deletion includes saved passwords, etc)
5. when it is done it will again show C: at this time carefully type in Shutdown(space)-R (enter) (a shutdown clock will appear and countdown to re-boot...usually 30 seconds)
6. after "re-boot", click on MY computer, Right Click on you C drive, click Properties, select tools, select Error checking Check now: check both repeat both boxes... it will ask you if you want to do this on your next re-boot...say YES. restart you computer and after it runs (usually takes a while) go back and run your defrag
you also didnot indicate what explorer you are running 6, 7, or 8???
I personnaly have not had a lot of faith in eith and am still running 7 on XP Pro with a lot of success and no problems
try thye above with nothing to lose but some time
sleep well puppadave
Good advice, but...
by rbsjrx - 8/14/09 8:08 PM In reply to: to format or not to format that is the question by puppadave...not necessarily useful, depending on the user's experience level. In my case, this is all stuff I do routinely. The only time I consider reinstalling Windows is when it flat out won't boot at all. In such cases, nothing works, not even F8.
cleaning
by xpdeg - 8/15/09 5:32 AM In reply to: to format or not to format that is the question by puppadaveHey, where did you learn that? I never heard anything like it.
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