Windows 11

[Bad Aim]

So, back in my prime days of Windows Me, Windows 98, and Windows XP, it was pretty important to do a clean install of Windows about once a year, sooner sometimes if Windows was acting up.

My understanding of why this was necessary was Windows 98 had a problem with its registry. When you uninstalled a program there was a pretty good chance that Windows was not going to remove the program from its registry. This could slow Windows down.

Random programs would put itself as a program that needed to be booted up at start up when that was not actually needed.

Then there was programs that people installed back in the day (programs that if I named them I could get banned) and had no real clue that they were installing programs. Back in the 90's there were certain programs that when you installed them they would pop up with "Do you want this program installed" or "Do you want to stop this program from being installed", catching people who didn't actually take the time to read what the pop-up was.

So, it has been a while since I did a clean install. I'm curious if any of these things still happen? (I no longer deal with sites that would ask about multiple programs being installed on your computer) I am unwilling to go through Windows Registry as that is just tedious as hell and I would rather just do a clean install. I have 80TB of cloud drive I can use to save important files such as music, pictures, and docs.

Thank you,


EDIT: Corrected some spelling errors

[Lixire]

I'm pretty much running a Windows install from about 5 years that went through multiple feature upgrades (10 1909 -> 10 2004 -> 10 20H2 -> 10 21H1 -> 11 21H2 -> 11 22H2 and 23H2 now). GPU upgrade and a full on platform upgrade (9900K -> 7800X3D).

Yet performance in benchmarks are the same as everyone else is getting and the system is still very snappy. I don't believe that's the case anymore.

[Karumati]

not reinstalling and using win11 pro with disabled updates, works just fine.

[emoticorpse]

Windows has come a long way since the XP and everything before it. But at the same time, it is a talent to somehow keep Windows 10/11 from acting up. All it takes is one bad program to mess it up. So, if you don't know how to manage and carefully select software, then you may have to end up re-installing just as often as with the older versions.

[Lixire]

İlk olarak emoticorpse tarafından gönderildi:

Windows has come a long way since the XP and everything before it. But at the same time, it is a talent to somehow keep Windows 10/11 from acting up. All it takes is one bad program to mess it up. So, if you don't know how to manage and carefully select software, then you may have to end up re-installing just as often as with the older versions.

Honestly most of the issues I did notice on Windows 10 and 11 are happening due to fast startup being enabled by default. so the OS never shut downs properly and it just keeps the same dirty copy in memory until you actually restart the OS.

Once this thing has been disabled? a large number of driver issues and the OS misbehaving pretty much disappear.

[Zefar]

İlk olarak Thrawnald McDonald tarafından gönderildi:

So, back in my prime days of Windows Me, Windows 98, and Windows XP, it was pretty important to do a clean install of Windows about once a year, sooner sometimes if Windows was acting up.

It was more about harddrives making your OS slower and slower the longer you used it.

İlk olarak Thrawnald McDonald tarafından gönderildi:

My understanding of why this was necessary was Windows 98 had a problem with its registry. When you uninstalled a program there was a pretty good chance that Windows was not going to remove the program from its registry. This could slow Windows down.

Random programs would put itself as a program that needed to be booted up at start up when that was not actually needed.

Bloat was a thing in the olden days and with a harddrive it was only a matter of time before things got bad.

But yes the registry would get larger and larger as you kept installing stuff.

İlk olarak Thrawnald McDonald tarafından gönderildi:

So, it has been a while since I did a clean install. I'm curious if any of these things still happen? (I no longer deal with sites that would ask about multiple programs being installed on your computer) I am unwilling to go through Windows Registry as that is just tedious as hell and I would rather just do a clean install. I have 80TB of cloud drive I can use to save important files such as music, pictures, and docs.

Thank you,
:oldmanhead:

EDIT: Corrected some spelling errors

Just get a SSD or NVME for the boot drive and this is a none issue. 256 GB is what I picked and it's more than enough.

I went from Win8.1 -> Win10(stayed on it for 7-8 years) -> Win11 and I had no issues. This also switching to different hardware in both GPU, CPU and Motherboard.
I also only used Upgrade option. The supposedly worst option.

My SSD did die on me when I was on Win11.
I think I might have reached the read and write limits on it. So I went and bought a new one and hope it'll last longer than 10 years.

[Illusion of Progress]

İlk olarak emoticorpse tarafından gönderildi:

Windows has come a long way since the XP and everything before it. But at the same time, it is a talent to somehow keep Windows 10/11 from acting up.

This is a good summary in my opinion. Modern Windows has potential to be boringly stable but it also likes to take control from you and make you fight it to get it back. Definitely disable Fast Startup (not to be confused with the BIOS options often called "Fast Boot" as they are two different things) or even just disable hibernation outright. Shutdown no longer fully shuts down but it hibernates the kernal to disk and doesn't reinitialize it with Fast Startup enabled, and this doesn't allow many things that are solved by "did turning it back off and on fix it" do so.

I personally feel like hardware and software quality have slipped in recent years. Post-pandemic hardware seems far more prone to fault (but I'm basing this on my own experience and of a rather small sample size, but it's shocking to me that perhaps over half of my hardware issues occurred in the last few years when my total time span is about two decades), and software has slipped more into a "push it out the door, maybe fix it later" mindset.

But at the same time, I haven't had to reinstall Windows 7+ often (almost never), whereas I was doing it on the regular with Windows XP (usually for small issues and not show stopping ones though). One difference is I tinkered more back then. I ran registry cleaners, played with services and page file settings, and so on. And we had periods of time where hardware was problematic bad then too (the capacitor plague and the issues with late 2000s GPUs failing due to cracking solder come to mind).

No, there's no need to reinstall an OS just because a certain amount of time has passed. Reinstall it if a need arises. That was basically always true but it is more so these days. Windows 9x was vastly different, and even Windows XP is far different from modern Windows.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Another way Win10/11 are different is you can basically perform a clean install by doing an OS Reset and then from that you have option of a.clean OS or to Keep Apps & Files. It uses the OS files it already has to do a clean OS factory reset.

With these OS doing a complete C Drive wipe + clean install via USB is optional.