I just reformatted my first hard drive...was very nervous when I began as I was unsure as to whether or not I had everything I needed. Computer has never worked better. I really have you guys to thank as in another thread, you made me rethink whether or not it would be a wise decision. Thx everybody! :cheers:

I've heard people say that you should reformat your computer every year/2 years even if nothing major is wrong. Apparently it helps eradicate potential problems and fine-tunes the registry which grows massive and unyieldy after a while.

There are less drastic ways to keep you computer up to speed. Clean out the registry once in while by hand. You do need to know what you are doing if you want to do that and it still leaves a lot of junk in the windows directory (mostly unused .dll's) that slow down everything. If only programmers would clean up more after themselves. Computers would be twice as fast today if programs were fine tuned to the maximum possible.

Still you wouldn't need to reformat the HD. Just backup anything worthy somewhere and delete anything from your HD. Best through getting the Norton Commander here on the site and after that rebooting the PC and pressing F5, and if that doesn't work, F8, shortly before the boot begins. That drops to Dos and you can start the Norton Commander. Just enable there option to see hidden and system files and delete anything, including the commander. Then simply re-install Windows('s). No much time-taking formatting needed. ;)

:blink: why is it that everyone suggests the helpful things after the fact? :blink:

Good but don't get too excited :angel:

Did you ever hear of this proverb: people care about you only when you just died? ;)
Not that it's in my case like that, but I just thought on posting about easier way to do this when I read that you formatted your HD. Didn't know that before. :whistle:

i format my pc every 6months. often due to the amount i upgrade various parts etc. and just plain the amount of work i do.

I format my pc every 2 weeks LOL!!!!!! :bleh: . Why? Cause Micro$oft piece of crap fails on me. That and my psu, hdd, and motherboard are dieing.

Do you guys do this with XP? Before that I did the same with W98SE, but XP works fine with some regcleaning now and then.