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How often do you (re)install your OS?

Darmok N Jalad said:
Just curious how long folks go between OS installs, and I'm interested in the discussion that evolves. Back in college, I think I reinstalled Windows every week ....

I jumped to an Arch-based distro earlier this year, ...
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I just quoted the first post - to see the initial post.

My gentoo linux installation is from 2006. At that time I created my forums.gentoo.org account. A few years ago I had to do some cleanup on the config files. Everything is moved easily from harddrive to harddrive or to the backup drive. The laziness to not setup all the stuff again and again as I'm forced to from Windows XP, VISTA, 10 home (laptop), 10 pro (am4), 11 pro (am5). Not to move programms, data, settings.

the current windows 11 pro installation dates back to the hardware "upgrade" purchase of may 2023. Windows is not really backward compatible or upgrade compatible. I'm talking about Windows 3.11 upwards. Especially Windows Vista and XP. I have it because I used to play computer games.
 
This year i have reinstalled my OS 4 times , 1 time for my 1650 v2 than a second time trying to solve an issue, third time was when i purchased the 1680 v2 and last month when i upgraded to a new platform x370 with the R7 3800x. Usually tough i used to reinstall once every year since the times of Xp and later W 7.
 
Never, and I like to keep it that way ;)
 
Not sure I would call it a 'reinstall', but when I first installed W11, I made a backup image with Acronis, and every so often, I will restore the backup, update various drivers, utilities, etc., and make a new backup image.

Takes about 7 to 8 minutes to 'install' the backup image.
 
I sure don't get this desire or need to reinstall. Modern operating systems are not W95.

Once a month? :eek: That's not a need or desire. That's an unhealthy compulsion. :(

According to systeminfo, W10 Pro OS was last installed on this system on 6/1/2020, 10:25;23 AM. And guess what? It still works fine. It boots in less than a minute and wakes from sleep in seconds.
 
When I build a new system (CPU, MOBO, RAM). So, really a clean install - I wipe out everything and grab files, etc., off my backup drives. Reinstall all software. I have had to do a couple of re-installs over the years when stuff got so borked there was no way around it, but I don't do it regularly. I should probably do a clean install of Win11 2H24 - but I'm just too lazy atm.
 
Once a month is silly yeah, but OTOH installing an OS these days is so very fast. In the olden days it was a multi-hour process but now it's minutes, especially if you have a lot of stuff and settings in the cloud and the only software is a Steam folder on a separate drive.
 
Frick said:
but OTOH installing an OS these days is so very fast.
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Sure, compared to the olden days it is very fast. But when unnecessary it is still a waste of time and odds are, the "fresh" install will still require a bunch of updates to get current (with the OS and installed programs) and that can and usually does take some time.
 
Bill_Bright said:
Once a month? :eek: That's not a need or desire. That's an unhealthy compulsion. :(
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OCD-101 at it's finest, rock on & commiserate at your convenience, hahaha :D
 
Even if regular fresh reinstalls achieved a more significant performance impact, i'd be too lazy to commit. Its an exhaustive exercise, especially with the amount of applications i'm running, not to mention settings, preferences, etc.

If you’re someone who constantly finds yourself stuck in a cycle of rapid-fire reinstalls, consider this: on your next fresh installation, take the time to set up all your apps, games, settings, and preferences exactly how you like them, then clone your drive. Even better: make 52 clones on 52 storage devices for the added convenience lol and rotate them weekly to satisfy your obsession for that factory fresh experience. Problem solved...your TPU resident OCD-doctor: Wheresmycar
 
I guess a better question would be: why do you reinstall your OS?
 
I Don't reinstall BUT I Do restore by image from AOMI When things go not Right
 
At home, I reinstall when I make a significant hardware change, like replacing the motherboard or getting a different storage controller. I reinstalled a bunch of times when testing Linux on desktop, but that's a testing environment so I don't think that counts.

At work, and on a relative's PC, I had to reinstall Windows 10 too many times. It's the same scenario each time. The system tries installing an update, the update takes forever, then randomly the system shuts down, and now the OS is broken, and your user files may or may not be recoverable. I think it was a bug that was fixed. It happened somewhere between the 1607 and 1809 builds in work, and 1607 LTSB on the relative's PC.

Back in the 98/XP days, I had to reinstall a few times due to the system getting oddly slow to startup, but I don't know if that was necessary. It felt better starting with an updated CD/ISO. It hasn't been a problem since I switched to SSDs. Maybe it was the HDDs getting fragmented.
 
I had to reinstall when I obtained a new graphics card because the bitlocker criteria was being violated so it complained to me... hence don't use bitlocker anymore (at least for now) its a system that's hyper paranoid of hardware changes & lets you know very quickly! This is with Win 11 Pro 24H2 all up to date.
 
Bill_Bright said:
Sure, compared to the olden days it is very fast. But when unnecessary it is still a waste of time and odds are, the "fresh" install will still require a bunch of updates to get current (with the OS and installed programs) and that can and usually does take some time.
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It'S about all those settings, applications, user accounts, user data, drivers.
 
Before my big reinstall I had a partially very slow Win10.

About every second boot it would be very slow to open folders and to do things like start disk manager (on the order of minutes).

I was unable to diagnose this before the whole thing committed suicide and I reinstalled. And what a painful reinstall that was.
 
Looking back to my pre AM4 days, once a month sounds about right, maybe even twice a month because bad memory OC or CPU OC becomes unstable due to mitigations being released at the time..

But since I moved to AM4, no problems unless I make them. My kids system is my real test mule, it is running some ram generously buy a kind member, and I don't do much to it except update it now and then, and give him a new GPU driver. I blow it out twice a year and it runs all the time. I know new sockets are waaay stronger, but AM4 is surprisingly good.

The real test will come when I build my other sons computer.. with literally the cheapest Adata ram that I could buy in the city. It is soo bad.

I had to make a profile for DOCP because if you kill the power to the PSU, the board will refuse to remember how you configured it. Just with that ram. I have 3 sets of B-Die and they all work no problem.. just them.

/ramble
 
I like to distro hop quite a bit so 4-6 months is my average. I have a 3 stage process where I first install the distro in VirtualBox and see if it a) meets my needs b) is stable enough not to annoy me and c) is interesting enough for further study. Most don't make it past this stage. After that I install it to a partition on a secondary drive (currently a 970 Evo) and mess around with it some more on bare hardware. If it really floats my boat then I'll install it to my main drive and run it until I get bored. Obviously this is not in a production environment, just my home rig.
 
Few times a year across different drives for different devices and purposes.
 
I don't think you should ever really need to do this... If you're going to bother doing it regularly, you can probably just put everything you're installing on an external SSD and do it via scripts with almost no manual input required.
 
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