It took me 4-6 solid weeks (hours each day) to setup my new Win10 machine due to the extreme toxic rubbish MS put into windows, setting up everything how I like it, it took me two solid days to get Crysis to run, another 2 solid days to get San Andrea's to run, etc. Now I have everything saved in meticulous steps so If I had to do it all again it might take 1-2weeks, its amazing how long it takes to do all that stuff, there is literally 1000's of things. So yeah, the idea of reinstalling windows is total lunacy and is an absolute measure of last resort for me. This is how its been since the days of XP.
I first got into PC gaming when XP came out, and back then some were saying how its good to reinstall your OS every 3-6months, its one of those things that lacked any rigorous predicting power so I rejected the idea given how complex it is to set up windows, at the time I had a 21" 1600x1200 monitor and the desktop was almost filled with icons. Back then it was very well proven if you visited certain sites your OS could be ruined, so I stayed off that stuff. The belief to me was as silly as degfraging your hard drive, like it was going to make an obvious noticeable difference.
Fast forward to Vista, and thats were my knowledge and wits exploded. At the time vista had many bugs and I became disillusioned with it, and people were saying how much better 7 was and Vista was crap. So i was gearing up for a new PC build with 7, but a whole bunch of issues prevented that like how 7 was too different, gaming was going multi-platform, so i stayed with vista and embellished it, got massive screens, speakers etc. and that machine is still going strong today and is the original OS install, the system has literally been kept running all that time apart from countless cleaning sessions, power outages, upgrades. It's had it's original 320GB WD HDD cloned to a Samsung 500GB sata SSD around half-way in its life, it's seen dozens of new optical blu-ray drives, dozens of sata drives and about 6-7 gpus the last one being a gtx970, its been online without an anti-virus aggressively for half its life, used aggressively for CS:S for 2/3 its life, its had a truly ludicrous amount of programs installed/uninstalled, its had ccleaner ran 5-10times a week for most of its life doing 3 pass cleaning and registry cleaning, it's given me literally 100s of bluescreens, it recently it was bluscreening like crazy and followed some strange wave and crest accelerated pattern, turned out it was a faulty reset button on the case, after that it was back to its stone cold reliability. After all that it still runs like a fking champ, it actually runs better in some ways than my new win10 machine, that new machine that cost me 12K in total actually bluescreens more often and thanks to the toxic clowns at MS it feels like dogshit to use navigating through windows and folders. Now someone is going to say your Win10 runs crap because you tweaked it so much.
No silly boy. People like me dont make such novice mistakes, we up hold the law of science and logic. It was doing that before I tweaked anything in its stock updated form, in fact Win10 behaves the same on a few other machines, the trained monkeys at MS still haven't fixed many of the issues on windows, like in win 10 the alt tab is completely broken under heavy multi-tasking, despite 96gb of ram...it does the exact same thing that vista does. Bunch of absolute clowns they are.
I stopped using that machine as sata ssd was just too slow and most browsers and stuff dont support it. Vista never died, it was murdered, it was selected against by evil corps.
Had some Win7 laptops the same deal, ran their whole life with the one install. still got my Thinkpad T430 which has been a rocket ship.
So like others the only sensible thing to do is keep cloned images of your drive, keep a whole list of them, keep all drivers, been doing that for years, dont be stupid and rely on MS for anything.
Now ill give those people credit, Win10 is amazingly stable, my crappy thinkpad T420S has been exposed to the net for 4years without an AV, no defender, been on a stupid amount of sites, some very dodgy and do all online buying on this and its extremely stable. Runs like toxic crap and feels awful with every mouse movement, but the OS is just stable and super. you cant kill windows like in the past, youd have to go completely out of your way going on the dark web. This laptop was a steal, at 200bucks refurbished, the battery had 87% of its capacity and I have put literally 300-400 more partial cycles on it, thats because its power draw is very high (~20watts) and it's got a small battery of just 44Wh.
To explain why windows is now so stable i use the floating tiles model. Vista and 7 were made up of 2-3 tiles and if one got nuked the whole OS ran like crap and didn't work well. Now windows is made up of like 20 tiles, all individual engines running independently and when you nuke one it has very little effect, Im not making this up, thats really how it works, you can rip out parts of the OS and never even know when using the thing.
I still miss programming in Assembler on an old Motorola 68k. I loved that on the old Commodore Amiga.Some of the new M$ Features have been available on that machine already.
I started learning ASM on 65C02/65C816 some years ago. Still not very good.
