How Often Should You Reformat?

How often should you reformat your hard drive and reinstall your operating system? This is a common question asked by many computer users. Personally, I don’t think there is a set time span which you should follow in terms of how often you should be formatting and reinstalling your operating system.  In fact, I always install my operating system with the mindset of not having to reformat or reinstall unless I get a new hard drive or am upgrading my current operating system.

Some good rules of thumb to keep your operating system running smooth is to run disk cleanup, defrag, separate your data onto different partitions and/or hard drives to keep fragmentation down, occasionally run anti-malware and anti-virus scans, and make sure you have free hard drive space at all times.  If you ever feel your computer is running slow and you do not want to have to deal with reinstalling everything, you might want to consider purchasing more RAM for your computer.

Note: Make sure your motherboard can support the additional RAM.  Check out Crucial.com for information regarding RAM upgrades.  Today’s standard is around 1-2GB of RAM.

Reformatting means you will need to completely reinstall everything so if you decide to reformat and reinstall, make sure you backup all of the data you want to keep!

Do you reformat often?  If so how often and why?  Leave a comment!