How often do you (re)install your OS?

[AusWolf]

Never really tried cloning, I never felt it was worth it. A reinstall is a good time to clean house.

It has been very useful for moving my installation around during complete system upgrades. That's how Windows 10 has been running fine since at least 3 complete system swaps.

 

[DaemonForce]

When I was a smol, the perfect OS was Windows Server 2003.
I stayed on this until Windows Server 2008 appeared and it was a good decade before I jumped ship.
Then I was hopping Server 2012/2016 for testing VR support and eventually ended on Win10 because it was less trouble.
Stupid unfixable garbage like the Xbox app was the last straw for gaming.

Now it's more trouble to stay on Win10 than jumping over to Win11, which completely defeats the purpose of running a Windows OS.
For each iteration I had some copy of WinPE crafted specifically for setup and maintenance of each system.
I stopped doing maintenance and jumped over to cutting out clutter like bad WindowsApp repos, BitLocker, Smartscreen and Defender.
If I were on Win11 it would be the same but worse. Gives you a pretty solid clue where we're at now.

Cloning is only worth it if you have a good base operating system where everything you want to use WORKS. We don't have that anymore.

 

[GerKNG]

Seriously? What are you doing to your system that you need to reinstall so many times in less than a year?

i don't have to most of the time. i just don't want a PC that ran through 5 different GPUs and two experimental ram overclocks.

 

[Onasi]

I still am running the RTM 11 build that I installed in October 2021. Before that, I ran 7 for a decade till the new build came around. It's genuinely hard to brick a Windows install nowadays. Back in the XP days... yeah, that was re-installed at least yearly.

 

[Chomiq]

Only 2 scenarios:
- I reinstall for new hardware
- something goes completely wrong with existing install

Which means - rarely.

 

[AUTOEXEC.BAT]

WinME is the one that been reinstalled the most as it bluescreened a lot. Win2k is the stable one if I'm not mistaken.

Everyone his skills...
Pentium 200 MMX with Windows ME here...last installed: around 20 years ago

Only when my OS crashes. I dont have the skills to recover a Linux distribution, so a clean install is the fastest way for me, and takes only 2 hours with everything.

The OS that had the most reinstalls was Windows 3.11.
That took forever on 8 or 9 diskettes.
Recently i bought a 486/33 with a driver missing in the startup files.
The last owner had a Setup folder on the HDD, so i could install again from there... It took me less then 5 minutes and i had a fresh Windows 3.11 install.

Back in the days i didnt know that was possible... No internet, no information...

From Windows 95 i knew and made copy of the Windows 95 setup files to the harddrive. And install from there.

 

[AusWolf]

i don't have to most of the time. i just don't want a PC that ran through 5 different GPUs and two experimental ram overclocks.

My Windows installation has gone through an Intel, and at least 2 or 3 AMD systems, as well as various GPUs from both vendors, and it still works flawlessly.

 

[GerKNG]

My Windows installation has gone through an Intel, and at least 2 or 3 AMD systems, as well as various GPUs from both vendors, and it still works flawlessly.

it works fine as well but my OCD does not

 

[unwind-protect]

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. Back in the days of NT4, the install required booting through 4 floppies before it could access the CD component, and then after maybe 30-40 minutes of copying to spinning rust, you'd boot for the first time. From there, you'd have to install service packs which might take another hour. You were definitely out of commission for the task. When BIOSes finally started being able to boot from optical drives, that helped the first step. It always sucked when one of your 4 floppies stopped reading. I always had 2 copies of each disk on hand!

It's not the time for the actual OS install. It is the time to re-apply all your customizations.

Everyone his skills...
Pentium 200 MMX with Windows ME here...last installed: around 20 years ago

Only when my OS crashes. I dont have the skills to recover a Linux distribution, so a clean install is the fastest way for me, and takes only 2 hours with everything.

On the other hand, you learn a lot when you work to fix a broken OS install.

Unless it is dependency hell, that's just boring and stupid.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Everyone his skills...
Pentium 200 MMX with Windows ME here...last installed: around 20 years ago

Only when my OS crashes. I dont have the skills to recover a Linux distribution, so a clean install is the fastest way for me, and takes only 2 hours with everything.

The OS that had the most reinstalls was Windows 3.11.
That took forever on 8 or 9 diskettes.
Recently i bought a 486/33 with a driver missing in the startup files.
The last owner had a Setup folder on the HDD, so i could install again from there... It took me less then 5 minutes and i had a fresh Windows 3.11 install.

Back in the days i didnt know that was possible... No internet, no information...

From Windows 95 i knew and made copy of the Windows 95 setup files to the harddrive. And install from there.

Yeah, at some point, I had figured out that you could copy the Win95 folder to a slave HDD, and then it was just a matter of using your recovery floppy to boot to the DOS prompt, do some FDISKing and formatting, then install back the the master drive. Ah, the old Master/Slave drive jumper setup needed with the old IDE ribbon. It was a good thing SATA arrived a long time ago and made the PC more...PC.

 

[A Computer Guy]

It has been very useful for moving my installation around during complete system upgrades. That's how Windows 10 has been running fine since at least 3 complete system swaps.

One gotcha using NVMe that's easy to overlook: If you don't test restoring your images to different drives, and you don't use the Standard NVMe driver, you might not be able to successfully boot after restoring the image. I found that out the hard way.

 

[freeagent]

I crashed my 11 install twice by using the wrong curve, instead of 2880, CPU now drops to 2940.. that bugs me.

So.. I will probably reinstall 11 shortly.. my 10 install is still mint

 

[unwind-protect]

One gotcha using NVMe that's easy to overlook if you don't test restoring your images to different drives is if you don't use the standard NVMe driver you might not be able to successfully boot after restoring the image. I found that out the hard way.

Which NVMe drives require special drivers?

 

[claylomax]

Roughly every 12-18 months

 

[rodneyhchef]

Whats the "widest" migration anyone has done? reading this thread I'm contemplating doing a W10 migration on my brothers PC instead of clean install. He's currently on i7-2600k but swapping to AM4 which will include cloning the OC off a SATA drive and onto an NVMe SSD

I am of similar age to some of the other "veterans" here, I can remember reinstalling W95 on floppy disk many times. it was great when I got a copy of the later CD-ROM version. reinstalls were pretty quick after that!

I built my current PC about 3 years ago and never done a reinstall. My last rig might have had 3-4 reinstalls in ~10 years. It does seem to be less necessary now!

 

[ShrimpBrime]

I'm on at least a 2nd/3rd fresh Install this year. (more than 1 drive)
More than this counting other platforms. (WXP on 1366 for example earlier this year)

 

[AusWolf]

Whats the "widest" migration anyone has done? reading this thread I'm contemplating doing a W10 migration on my brothers PC instead of clean install. He's currently on i7-2600k but swapping to AM4 which will include cloning the OC off a SATA drive and onto an NVMe SSD

Based on my experiences of using the same W10 cloned on Intel 11th gen, AM4 and AM5 on at least three different SSDs, I think you'll be fine.

 

[The N]

After very, very long time.

Actually, only when OS is not responding and/or flooded with bugs/unwanted files. In other words, when it behave abnormally, and cannot be restored. For me, reinstate software specifically Adobe After Effects with all the plugins and last known workable settings is quite a hassle and takes more time...........Time to set another restore point for perfectly stabled PC before its too late.

 

[D007]

Only when I absolutely have to and all other measures have failed lol.
Or when upgrading.
Maybe every couple of years.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Which NVMe drives require special drivers?

For example older Crucial P1, P2's or Samsung 970 Evo's had their own drivers but not necessarily required. Using the standard Microsoft driver is fine as far as I know.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Whenever i feel like it, last time was maybe 2 years ago.

I won't reinstall anymore now as i run Windows 10 still.

Hopefully in 2025 Microsoft pulls their heads out of their asses and fixes Windows 11 so it's safe to move over. Right now they keep appearing in the news weekly in a negative way, which stops me from installing Windows 11.

 

[AnotherReader]

Other than an undiagnosed faulty X370 motherboard sending me down a rabbit hole of OS and driver reinstalls, I haven't had to reinstall Windows since the XP days. My oldest working computer, a Phenom II X4 955, has been operational since early 2010 and in that time it has had two OS upgrades and five different GPUs:

1. Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 and Radeon HD 5750 to GTX 280 to R9 290X
2. R9 290X to GTX 680 followed by a Vega 64 (for testing) and Windows 8.1 to Windows 64

Ironically, earlier on, I had to reinstall Linux many times with the Nvidia driver being the culprit most of those times. In addition, I have had to reinstall iOS on an iPhone XR due to a battery draining bug.

 

[_roman_]

Just curious how long folks go between OS installs

My gentoo linux was installed in 2006 on a AMD turion MT-32 supermarket laptop. That was a rebranded MSI laptop. The installation moved over several harddrives and mainboards. AMD64 is backward compatible which i gladly abused. I had different file systems and software encryption over the years: ext3, ext4, xfs , lvm2 + ext4, lvm2 + luks + ext4 and finally lvm2 + luks + btrfs. I used before Slackware 96 / SUSE / Redhat / Ubuntu / Linux-Mint / Arch-Linux since 1996.

My current Windows 11 PRO installation dates back to the new hardware purchase in May 2023. A ryzen 7600X / X670 / 2x32GiB RAM Box.
The windows 10 Pro installation before was installed and used while i had around 1.5 years the hardware. A ryzen 5800X / B550 / various configs and RAM modules.

 

[Shrek]

I keep on thinking it would be fun to be a Windows insider and then think better of it and reinstall the OS.

 

[unwind-protect]

Whats the "widest" migration anyone has done?

Before my Win10 committed suicide it originated from Windows 2000. It almost made it to Win11 if MS' braindead tool didn't reject my 5950x.

I have both FreeBSD and Linux installs that got created more than 20 years ago.