Spring Cleaning For Your Hard Drive

Shutup Now writes "Spring cleaning for your hardrive. This article talks about some extremes for keeping your computer running well. You decide whether this stuff is necessary." More than once a year is a good idea, too.

Comments

Yes! Do it, darnit!

[TrekkieGod]

If you know what you're doing (as in, not the type of thing that should be posted in an article for novices, although he did include a warning) doing a clean install can have a *much* greater performance advantage in windows--including windows xp. Heck, from what I observed with my computer, I'd do it every 3 months...although every 6 months is good enough for most heavy users and every year should be good enough for the rest of the population.

The trick is knowing what you want to backup, and making absolutely sure that you have it in places that you'd normally back up anyway. If possible, keep all data files in a separate partition so you can just format the one where windows and the installed programs are. I'd never back up the windows directory (that's where most of the trash that I want to get rid of is), but I changed the outlook directory to "E:\My Documents\mail" (yes, I changed the my documents directory to the "data" partition as well). If you don't have a separate partition, keep a checklist of every directory that you need to backup, and save everything that you would want to backup to those directories.

The only good time to reinstall the OS is if there is something wrong with it.

Not really, sometimes there's something wrong with your system and the best way to truly fix it is by doing the clean install thing. Try running adaware and see how much spyware is installed. Then there are viruses...I've never had problems with them, but a friend of mine recently ran a scan and found 9 viruses in his computer, and his only detectable symptom was the computer would lock up often.

Basically, what I'm trying to say with all this is that, if you're careful, you can safely do clean installs without risking the loss of any data at all, and the benefits are much greater than "reorganizing and defragging". And to those who will undoubtly respond...yes, I know, I've never had the need to do frequent clean installs with my linux partition either.

One final advice for all you novices who are going to take the risk and do this for the first time. Don't follow these instructions:

Then you turn your computer off, put the operating system CD into the drive and turn the computer back on.

For god's sake...don't force your cdrom open when the computer is off. Just turn it on and plop the cd in there first thing, while in the bios screen :)