When should I reinstall?

When to reinstall is a big question and we break it down to 3 reasons: Stability, malware or fragmentation. As a rule of thumb I like to reinstall once a year, it keeps me from cluttering up my system with unused or unwanted apps, it keeps my documents folders clean and assures i've got at least one yearly backup should anything go wrong.
Below we explain in more detail what and why.

Stability

This reason is straight forward, you're noticing more and more crashes with your computer, perhaps it keeps not responding, In this instance It is advisable to check your hardware: Make sure your hard drive isn't ticking (which means it's dying), replace it if you can and do a full format and reinstall this way you've a clean install on possibly new hardware or a completely clean hard drive, this helps with fragmentation too.


Malware

It's always my firm suggestion that if you have had a virus on your system to format it, if your system has been comprimised it's hard to determine to what degree so it's always a safe bet to do a full format and reinstall. Sure reinstalling takes time for a possiblity of a non-issue however at the cost of maybe of a few hours of backing up and reinstalling can in turn save you hundreds (if not more) of dollars.


Fragmentation

As the hard drive writes data it writes to different sections of the hard drive, using defrag attempts to move that information commonly accessed together. So a defrag is good enough right? Well yes and no, if you factor in time it takes to defrag vs reinstall time as well as the stability you will get from a fresh install then you'll probably notice that reinstalling once a year will probably work out better/more efficient.



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