So I did the Windows reinstall dance again....

YEAH Friday I was forced to reinstall windows when my web browsers were screwing with my start menu.

Well guess what happens this time? Last Time I reinstalled windows I had a resource hog on my hands with more ram being used than I thought necessary This time it's a brisk 900mb.

The only issue was I couldn't get program installs to stick for a while if I did more than 1 install at once.

I've quickly come to learn that no two installs of windows are ever the same...even on the same computer.

So I'm at some kind of record here, 3 reinstalls of windows inside 1 year. I'd like to know what your records is, and what qwirks you bumped into.

 

Sounds like you've run into spyware and viruses other than Windows playing around...

 

Too many to comment on, although got it down to a fine art at this point, i've not had to do it in over a year really as i've not been using windows much at all. except the past few days for steam + the humble THQ bundle lol.

may have to do a windows xp reinstall soon but for someone else, which should be fun.

i am going to need to do this as i've only got 10gb left on this drive i've got windows 7 installed on my backup partition as the previous install screwed up, so its all going to get rearranged, drivers updated, the works

right now in windows 7, with 43 processes running including steam and firefox 17(2 tabs) and windows task manager, 1.6gb being used of 8gb, the machines been on for a day and a half and i've been playing metro 2033 a bit.

putting off doing the reinstall as long as possible.

windows is now just a secondary os, thats used primarily for games i cant run under linux and the windows partition has been used as a backup / dumping ground for everything under the sun hense only 10gb left (1TB drive 220gb part)

 

i seems to have to reinstall windows atleast once every 2 months, either i end up with some messed up system files or it runs dog slow, im trying windows 8 now lets see how long this install lasts.

 

I am not going to brag about mac or even plug apple.

 

I can only recommend that this time after you installed Windows and all the programs you need do a backup with a program like Paragon Backup and Recovery. Then every month or so do a new backup.

And when the day comes when Windows fucked up a driver install or you got a virus just revert to the last working backup or even to the very first.

 

Considering how many times I've had to fix OSX issues there is nothing to brag about there.

 

Ive had 3 kernel panic in the many years i have been using mac. Soo not to bad. For those that don't know kernel panic is in a nutshell a blue screen for unix systems.

 

Let me suggest an open-source, free, and great HDD cloning program. Install everything, even multiple OSes with grub or whatever, then use clonezilla to back up your HDD state. If anything goes wrong, restore to the same drive, or a bigger one.

http://clonezilla.org/

 

x2

+1

etc

also you can make up a custom windows unattended auto install iso which is what i used to do for xp, have not tried with 7 or 8 or even vista.

also find its a good idea to keep your os install on a seperate drive or partition than your data, makes things easier.

 

Complete and utter nonsense.

My job is making builds that deploy over and over again on multiple machines identically each time.

 

I had a 2005 laptop and tried installing Windows 98 on it, on one random attempt, the sound worked even though they never made driver for the sound chipset (actually windows misrecognized the sound chipset and then selected a driver that actually worked!) On a Windows Vista beta install, windows disabled Aero due to my chipset not supporting i, funny that it worked on every other install on that same computer, 50+ of them!

 

normally there shouldnt be a problem if the machines are standard office machines eg 1 build to install on 60 dell or hp desktops of the same or similar models.

but sometimes there are factors which effect the installs especially at home on custom machines or even stock off the shelf laptops / desktops, which may not be the fault of windows itself. more the enviroment / issues with the machine, install method/media etc that in turn causes somethign funky or not right to happen.

 

Standard office machine (business class) or standard home machine - all the same crap. PC is a PC, installing windows is the same on the same machine unless you do something different. This is a clear case of user error/issue

Also, builds support multiple machines easy. You dont just do basic images anymore like you seem to be thinking about - lookup MDT (or SCCM if you want something more managed in a business enviroment) you can support a number of machines all with different drivers and HAL (back in Windows XP) with no problem at all.

Anyway, he specifically says this is on the exact same machine that windows installation is never the same - that is even more nonsense than what you are talking about (different machines etc).

 

I used windows 7 since day one, i never had to re-install anything and i don't have any restoration point.

I think i might know the source of your problem....

 

The last two times were probably my fault. I think I over use CCleaner.

Here's the rundown on my reinstalls

April- Windows would freeze on start up reinstall= everything fine
August- I had a thread on this, browsers freezing, start menu screwing up
Now- Almost the exact same issues from the last reinstall only this time the problems from my previous install did not carry over (I deleted the Old.windows folder before it had the chance to fester the rest of my system. I also did minimal windows updates I'm only going to update a little at a time as needed. This way hopefully I won't ever have to reinstall windows again until I build my next computer.

 

i think i explained badly what i was thinking in my post.

anyway in all honnesty i dont think i've ever had any real problems with windows 7 where windows itself was at fault.

my post was more in relation to faults in the system itself or the media or a combination of the two. and the communication between both. eg currupt files which in turn causes certain drivers not to load / work correctly. as a very simplified example

machine or media specific defects rather then hardware combinations.

(throwing in my commend on the software rollouts maybe made my post confusing, my point there was that the same source would be in use at the same time or within the same time period)

edit: Mr Hard of Core, have you scanned your memory for errors with the likes of memtest?

 

I very rarely go an entire month without reinstalling Windows. I'm constantly trying out new utils and tools and things just get supremely cluttered, lots of stuff is terrible at actually uninstalling correctly.

I'm under no doubt that it's psychological more than anything, though, almost like a placebo effect.

 

Yeah I'm about 4 gigs shy of the space I had for the last install (433 free gigs VS 437 last time) , that might also be due to another partition added and features that didn't install last time being installed this time.

Still, 900mb ram at start up, everything is FAST and thus far no website hang ups, then again I am avoiding the sites that made my computer freeze to begin with.

 

Weeeelllll... I've been running my current install of Mac OS X since late 2011 and it's still lightning fast. Just an observation.