Be Excellent To Each Other

My PC is about 4 years old and Windows 7 has been on it for about 2 or 3 of those years. I've never done a fresh reinstall of Windows.

Should I? And if so, how often?

On my old XP machine I tried to do it every year (new years day fact fans) but I don't know how important it is now.

Is your PC struggling? Are you seeing bad slowdown? Do you have an itching between your toes?

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team.

I don't think I've ever done a fresh install of Windows 7, whereas XP seemed to need a new one every year.

I am with Myp, but I replaced my HDD last year, so did an install then.

We do them at work ever now and again, but mainly because we're lazy and can't be arsed to clean up existing files on the PC before giving it to someone else.

It's painless, but unless you're seeing a problem, I wouldn't bother.

My work PC is on 7 and is horrendously slow after about 18 months, I need to do something with it - I'm toying with the idea of putting an SSD in it?

Yeah, that'll help. Figuring out why it's slowed down would also be a good idea.

Just general shit being added to it and bogging it down over time I think.

I don't think my PC is that slow, but it could be faster. Maybe an SSD would be a wiser investment?

Msconfig.exe is handy for spotting all the things you really don't need running that are all launching themselves at startup time.

I keep an eye on that and am quite lean on my startup. For instance, Dropbox is quite a hog so I'm thinking I don't need that running all the time.

Windows 7 is ok for rebuilds, I just did mine after around 3 years.

I think I better OS and the fact I'm not installing as much shit as I did say 10 years ago makes it last longer

Also use VMware for stuff as well

I've never found a reason for re-installing my Windows 7 machine and, until recently, it's been running Windows 7 for about 3 years now.

As for the 'until recently' part, I've formatted it now to separate the 2x 1TB drives I had in a striped RAID and install OS X on one of them. I've actually managed to successfully Hackintosh my PC after all this time, which is pretty handy for me considering the job I do, as I've turned it into a handy Mavericks server, so it's providing a Time Machine backup service to my Mac laptop and allows me to learn a little bit about setting up Open Directory.

I'l probably shove Windows 7 back on the other drive at some point when I can be arsed to do so - it would be nice to be able to play some of my PC games again (although as Mavericks is picking up my GTX 280 graphics card just fine, it does a pretty decent job of playing some of the Mac games I have anyhow).

I've decided against reinstalling thanks to everyone's advice but now I'm toying with the idea of an SSD. How hard is it to clone my current main drive?

install fresh on your SSD?

It's what I'd do, keeps no the old one around as a backup until you're happy.

But there are several tools to do it, and they don't look hard to use unless the size of data exceeds the size of the ssd, in which case you need a third to store data not going on the ssd.

A fresh install... I hadn't thought of that. I could set my current drive as a secondary drive couldn't I? Would that work?

Yeah, should do.

Unless you do something stupid

Let's not rule that out completely...

Applications installed on your old drive won't be 'installed' in the new windows install. The files will be on disk, but Windows won't see them. Other than that, everything should work.

Yeah, I thought that but they'll still be there if I need to revert back to my old drive and they'll be there to remind me what I have installed.

It's mainly about having then backed up there to be honest.

Why would you ever need to do that? What could possible happen after setting everything up on the new drive to cause you to think, "Nah, I don't like this new one; I think I'll go back to the old one?" As long as your data files are backed up any other possible incident just means reinstalling Windows and apps on the new one; I can't see why you'd ever want to go back to an old Windows install on an old HDD.




Or you could just make a comprehensive list of what you've got installed on the current drive before you start fiddling around? Which presumably you'll need to do anyway.

I dunno, you just seem to be making this into a bit of a drama. What apps have you got installed on your current disk you're so terrified won't happily install on a new one?

When I say revert, I mean refer. I guess it does sound like a drama but I'm just thinking/typing out loud.

just you wait till I start my SSD recommendation thread! Imagine the drama when money is involved!

What you need is a spreadsheet of all available ssds. Then it'll be easy for you.

That won't work, he'll just end up with a load of different SSDs that he'll never actually use.

Shots fired!

I cloned both my bog-standard-Intel.laptop and crazy-amd-build-in microserver to SSDs and both worked perfectly after. With my SanDisk extremes.anyway, the first one I got is famously shit as an OS drive (but now fine as a music transporter)

I don't remember how I did it. Possibly a gparted live cd, manually telling it to start at 1MB or something. Which is important maybe.

Anyone got a spare product key for Windows 7 x64 Ultimate I could borrow?

Wait one

Waiting…?

Thanks Grim…should have known to come here first rather than faffing around all evening.

Do you still need one?

No thanks, I'm all set.

It seems that when doing an 'upgrade' to Windows 10 there will be an option to do a clean install as part of it which is good as that's what I want to do. Now I just need to hope I've got enough free space on my second drive to backup my entire Steam apps folder because fuck redownloading all that...

I have just re-installed Windows 7. Was quite simple, not putting a lot back on, until I have upgraded to Win 10

I may have to install w10 on my Pro3 when it comes back on line with the RTM in the next couple of days. I have a fairly early build running on the Pro (and current fast ring mobile preview on my phone) and they're both pretty sweet.

Given how much I love 8, and how 7 has core issues I'm definitely sold on 10. Looking forward to it !

This thread has reminded me.. I need to install a new hard drive to back stuff up before the end of the month!

You don't need to rush. Even if you pre reserve you're not necessarily getting it in July.

Also don't you get a huge OneDrive off windows phone to negate the need to back up? I'm sure I've got a terabyte.

I've *only* got 30gb through Onedrive. Maybe that was through your surface?

I've got the drive sitting on my shelf as it's my old one that was replaced with an SSD so I may as well do it but I'm not going to rush... It's probably been sitting there for about a year already.

Ah, 365. Forgot dat.

I've got a 1tB. It's virtually empty. I should put something in it. Maybe pictures of my dog. Yeah, groovy.

go on, what core issues does 7 have?

None if you are using four, or up to four. Once you hit I7 territory and above though it tends to suffer from issues which the only fix for is a rather crude core parking hack.

It's not an issue in software that doesn't care for cores, but in certain software an I7 is considerably worse than an I5.

Windows 8 got a complete rewrite so handles multiple threads far better than 7, and also fully supports the AMD FX architecture so if you are running for example a FX 8 core you can get up to 15% more performance in highly threaded apps and games.

Not an issue unless you're a core whore like myself. My lady's rig for example runs a 8c 16t Xeon, so 8 was a must. Due to the core handling things like multi tasking are far better too

8 was not just 7 with an Ipad glued on like many people accused it of being. Underneath had a massive amount of work done on it also.

LiveDrive for all my backing up needs.

..........................................

They want people on it so they can attract developers to their App platform and start to make money.

Also with Windows 8 and 10 you need an MS account which you can use for apps, Skype, Ondrive, etc they want more people on this as well

Don't ever do this. The registry never needs 'cleaning'. Don't use registry cleaners - at best they'll do nothing at all, at worst they'll break something. The registry is big ass list of config settings. If there are extra settings in there that aren't needed, Windows will just ignore them.