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Harodman's avatar
Harodman
Iron Contributor
Jan 06, 2025

How often do you (re)install your OS?

Just curious how long folks go between OS installs, and I'm interested in the discussion that evolves. Back in college, I think I reinstalled Windows every week, often because I'd alternate between versions quite a bit (95/98, NT4, Me, 2K...yeah, I'm old). These days, my aim for OS configs is to "set it and forget it" and see how long I can go without breaking it.

I jumped to an Arch-based distro earlier this year, Manjaro, and ye ol' command line says it was installed on May 22, 2024, so 5 months in with no trouble, so far. My only urge to reinstall at this point is to put it on a far newer drive than a 128GB SATA SSD (testing evolved into production, lol), but I also have an NVME secondary drive that handles much of the heavy lifting, so I haven't really felt the need yet.

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  • jensstevens's avatar
    jensstevens
    Copper Contributor
    Jan 07, 2025

    I wrote a script that installs all my software I need. If I don't need that software I exclude it. Meaning I reinstall my laptop every 2-3 months.

  • SriniThumala's avatar
    SriniThumala
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Jan 06, 2025

    Hi Harodman

    You're absolutely right. Back in my college days, I often had to reinstall the operating system on my PC because it would either blue screen or fail to boot properly. This was during the time I used Windows 98 and ME. However, I haven't encountered such issues in recent years. I can't even remember needing to reinstall Windows 10 or 11 on my laptop. Typically, I just do an in-place upgrade. Plus, I tend to replace my laptop every 3-4 years, and the new one usually comes with the latest OS version.

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