Should I refomatt

I have over 1,200,000 items in my registry, and I have never reformatted this computer's hard drive in over 3 years. One thing I notice is some funky sound error, that every once in a while it will play in Winamp and then it won't but it plays in Quicktime?

Its kinda a dumb question but, worth some feedback.

If you are getting recurring errors and slowdowns then a format would be good. Its good to reformat your HDD every year...sometimes every 6 months. Back up the stuff you need...burn them to a CD....pop in your WinXP CD....reformat and reinstall.

Yeah, looks like thats what I need to do.

Gonna get some Dr.Pepper and work on this all night.

If you're able to go through the depths of the disk and the registry you don't need to reformat.

I own this disk in my PC for 5 years now, and it was never reformatted. In between, I've even changed my motherboard, graphics card, and sound card, all together at the same time.

The computer store guy told me that I needed to format or my computer would never work properly again. He was on the butt 2 two days after when I showed him.

All you need to do is tweak a bit around it and it works still fine, on the same old good system I use since 1998, Win98SE. No hassle, no trouble, no restarts, no slow downs... Just like an old car you know: if you're a good mechanic, and if you take care of it it will work for years and years.

Just my 2 cents.

Ehhh....I see reformatting as cleaning out the gutters. Gotta do it every once and a while or else the water cant flow.

Originally posted by dreamlandmafia
Ehhh....I see reformatting as cleaning out the gutters. Gotta do it every once and a while or else the water cant flow.

Exactly. I format my machine once every year. Which is something i need to do anyways since I change my computer once a year. So technically im not reformatting the old one but getting a new one. LOL.

But it's still recommended you format your computer every once in a while.

ocelot---

you get a new computer every year???

damn your lucky

anyway a person should also "ghost" his / her computer once a year also...

Originally posted by dreamlandmafia
If you are getting recurring errors and slowdowns then a format would be good. Its good to reformat your HDD every year...sometimes every 6 months. Back up the stuff you need...burn them to a CD....pop in your WinXP CD....reformat and reinstall.

And activate XP's firewall immediately (or install real firewall) before connecting PC to internet, MSBlaster and these other worms can infect your PC in couple seconds when you connect it to internet.
(But if you're behind router/NAPT you're safe from worms spreading that way... unless you have forwarded all ports to your PC)

how about simply using a registry cleaner? a registry with lots of unneeded (sp?) and useless keys can really slow down a computer.



www.download.com...

Reformatted Sunday night, and what a pain in the ass.

That went fine, but I spent the last 2 days trying to reinstall my DSL modem, for some reason itwould'nt respond. Thank God, I got that working.

JediMaster, now that you've done the hard yards, I beg you to image your O/S at once, then repeat the process regularly - like when it's all tweaked nicely, & each time you patch etc. Only takes a few minutes & you'll never havta format/clean install again.

Also something that has not been mentioned is Disk Defrag. When you format the disk you need to run windows disk defrag. When you go to sleep leave it running.

Defragment only if you use Fat32 or Fat16. You never have to defrag NTFS partitions (which are on XP,win2k, and NT 4).

I do not know if you would want to defragment if you use Linux, BeOS, GNU, or Unix.

[Edited on 22-7-2004 by Crysstaafur]