Last time i made this as a joke, telling "reinstall your OS" LOL, i'll never doi it never again i promise
Well, don't misunderstand me.
I'm not saying that suggesting it is bad. Nor is doing it because the issue is something that you otherwise can't figure out.
I just see it as the "nuclear" option, and I think some people are a little too happy to throw the suggestion around early and easily in any troubleshooting scenario.
All in all, I'm actually surprised with the feedback so far. Even in an enthusiast community, folks really seem to have the desire to leave well enough alone. A bit ironic, since these days it takes little time at all to format and reinstall.
I can only speak for myself, but a lot of the things I leave alone are precisely because because I've learned better. I installed Windows XP many handfuls of times. I don't have the willingness to waste that much time any more. If something may be beneficial, I'll either research it, or try it myself to see what the difference is. If I can't find an obvious reason for it one way or the other, I'll leave it at the default. Worst case scenario, I might be missing out on some small benefit by leaving something alone, which is generally better than breaking something (and "breaking something" can simply be a session crash or application crash as opposed to a broken operating system). It's worse when it comes to something like the page file, which often gets perpetuated specifically by enthusiasts and other people with more RAM than they use, so they get away with settings that might be restrictive, and so they push it on others who probably aren't in that "have more RAM than I touch" boat with justifications like "you totally have to manually define your page file or games won't work right". And if you try and tell them why recommendations like that could be harmful, or ask them to prove any of these things they say, they tend to bow out, or they give you the "it's worked fine for me for years/decades". I might be picky on this one because it's one I used to do, and then I learned better, and I often have to help people fix this when it causes them issues because they changed it because "someone advised them to".
And reinstalling the operating system is definitely faster, but that isn't the part that takes the most time and effort for me. Even back when we were installing from optical media to hard drives, it wasn't even close to the part that took up the most time. The time and effort part is getting the software environment set up the way I want. For some of us, that's a lot more than it is for others. Why waste that time if I don't too have to? "Windows is faster when fresh?" Okay, the time I'm potentially saving is more than lost with the extra time installing it fresh/setting it up, especially when it just slows back down again anyway. And my system starts up fast enough for me anyway; most of the time is spent in the BIOS/POST phase because of my RAM and storage configuration, so a fresh Windows install won't help there.
This community seems to skew a bit older in my impression? If so, I'd say the reason is perhaps because a lot of people have "been there, done that" and don't have the willingness to burn time for placebo or risks anymore. Time becomes more valuable as you get older.
