One thing that annoys me with Windows is how easily useless stuff builds up and never goes away until you stumble across it all. Sure you can trudge through it all and find uninstallers or manually remove it, but I usually find the best way is a simple reinstall of Windows. Oh, and by the way, I’m not talking about windows on your house, I’m talking about WindowsXP. :p
Over the past year I performed a number of hacks and mods, most of which can’t be removed. Two big ones I done were to add Media Center 2005 to XP Pro and add the sidebar from Vista.
So now, I’m currently going through Windows Setup (formatting at 25%), then comes the fun of installing drivers, updates and then finding all the programs that I use daily.
On the upside, this gives me a chance to look at what I use and see if there are any alternatives out there that may be better.
Some may wonder why I don’t just install Ubuntu (or other linux flavour), but the reason behind it is that I can do things much faster in Windows, I don’t really have time to tell Ubuntu who is boss trying to work it out, and I have a heap of Windows only programs that I use regularly and I don’t want to fart around with virtual machines, oh, and I stream to my Xbox360 and my wife doesn’t like Linux.
Reader Question: For you Windows users out there, how often do you do a fresh install of Windows and why? Any hints or tips I should take note of for next time?
Hmm, I would normally re-install Windoze about every 6 months.
I haven’t done mine for about 18 months and I realised last night that I only had about 188mb left on the C Drive (a 30 gig partition). Did some cleaning and now have 1.05 gb.
I think it’s time I did my re-install. It’s just such a pain in the butt to set up all the profiles and mail stuff again.
Tips?
1. Only use the system partition for the system. Store all data (including profiles) on a different partition.
2. If it ain’t broke…
Just install Ubuntu . . . oh wait, you already mentioned that
. There’s nothing inherently wrong with running Windows. I think a lot of it comes down to personal preference. Also, there’s a good deal of give and take. With Linux you might not be able to use some of your software, instead having to use FOSS, but then again, you won’t have to reinstall your OS twice a year. With Windows you will have much more software options.
Gee Colin, I’d hate to see my machine after 18 months. I have a 250GB drive for all my data. Though all my profiles are stored on the C:\. I just backup the Application Data directory that houses all my profiles. Then again, I don’t really have any profiles that I keep. I like to start them again. Especially my Firefox one. It gets so clogged up. Google Sync sorts me out here regards bookmarks and stuff.
As much as I’d love to have Ubuntu as my primary OS, I still have it as a second boot option. From time to time, I boot into it and have a play around, but yeah, I like to have software options, plus I find everything works in Windows. There are some things that I just can’t work out in Ubuntu.
I can understand where you’re coming from. However, I’ve had a great experience with Ubuntu as my primary OS. Now I get frustrated when I use Windows
lol @ Ben its true, I’m the same way — Windows is now rough for me coming from Linux.
In either case, I’ve heard that many people create a Norton Ghost image once they get everything perfect. If you have the disk space (only a few GB), then it can make reinstalls painless and only take about an hour.
I’ve heard the same things, but then you’d have to go and update all your software to the newest and latest versions.