Formatting your hard drive

[tongyun]

How often do you format your hard drive just to get rid of junk that's accumulated on your PC? Since I have kids who use the computer, I try to do this about once a year.

[Arudo]

Well I only format my hard drive when there's serious problem or I sense danger is coming
If there's nothing serious, I won't format it.

[Machida]

I am only doing it when I couldn’t do anything anymore on my computer. It means that the computer has to stop working before I would format it.

[seth]

I format on an almost yearly basis with all my computers, although most of them are sub-1 year old - especially with Vista I find that after about a year the whole thing slows to the point that it's unbearable, and I just give up on it :P

[macfrik]

If nothing really serious in your computer in terms of software, why bother formatting your hard drive? That's a lot of work in formatting a computer, especially a PC!

[seth]

I know, but it does often result in a net gain in performance, you clear out all the crap Windows has accumulated in the past however long, which in most cases is rather a lot :P

[21Cfox]

I don't have a fixed schedule of formatting my hard drive (if there are many unused files on it, I will just clean them manually). I wonder if it is recommended. I think formatting your hard drive too often may affect it physically.

[Charlie]

Originally Posted by seth

I know, but it does often result in a net gain in performance, you clear out all the crap Windows has accumulated in the past however long, which in most cases is rather a lot :P

That said, careful management of your machine, removal of unwanted programs and ensuring that you have good anti virus and anti spyware should also do it.

Originally Posted by 21Cfox

I don't have a fixed schedule of formatting my hard drive (if there are many unused files on it, I will just clean them manually). I wonder if it is recommended. I think formatting your hard drive too often may affect it physically.

It shouldn't really do any harm, its doesn't work that way.

[Megan]

We've only formatted our hard drive the couple of times when we have gotten hit with a virus. Other than that, we let our virus software clean out our drives every once in a while and get rid of cookies, and we'll go through and see what programs we're not using and delete them ourselves.