kevin - Thursday, October 18, 2007 - maybe its time someone else built that box for you ;P

Ralf - Thursday, October 18, 2007 - Hi Rob,
I dunno where your Aero is gone (by the way, if you spray the bad F-word in the search box, than look at your browser tab :-) ) but I installed Vista on my machine as it came out last year and its still up and running. The best of all is, so far I haven´t experienced the XP slow down after several months.
There are glitches and uncomfortable things in Vista but from stability I can´t complain.
Good luck
Ralf

Rob Conery - Thursday, October 18, 2007 - LOL whoops! I've edited the post and removed. I'm sure it's something I'm doing, but what it is I can't guess!

Martin Harris - Thursday, October 18, 2007 - I seem to find myself restore my PC from backup (or when I'm really sadistic from clean install) on a far to frequent basis of ever four or five months. I just take it as something normal. Maybe I install/uninstall too many miscellaneous applications and demos perhaps? I do not know. The same normally goes for my laptop, but I've steadfastly refused to restore/reinstall it mainly because I'm too lazy to set time aside for the task.

Rob K. - Friday, October 19, 2007 - I recently had an issue with a box that kept getting slower and slower... turns out a stick of RAM went bad on me. A new 1 gig stick and I'm back in business, although I'm sure the next fix won't be as easy as this one.

Am about to start looking into doing most everything off of a few VMs... just seems easier to manage.

Steven Harman - Friday, October 19, 2007 - On XP I typically only made it about 5 months b/t repaves... and since moving to Vista, it's been about the same. Although I'm already at about the 3.5 month mark and my box is still running hot, so maybe I'll actually reach 6 months this time. Of course, that's assuming that the deterioration of my machine follows a (O)n rather than (O)n log n... or God forbid (O)n^2

Shawn Oster - Friday, October 19, 2007 - I redo my machine every 6 months or so and that's just me "refactoring my partitions and application structure to reduce coupling". It's almost Zen like really.

Both XP SP2 and Vista have actually been pretty solid for me, at least until an external hard drive started to go. It took it 4 months to die but it finally kicked the bucket and took my stable user experience with it.

Stephan Vinkenborg - Friday, October 19, 2007 - I always make it a point to refuse to let the damn thing die. I've had a windows 95 running for over 5 years. I've had to manually resurrect it from the dead more times I care to remember. Windows 98 and XP the same story. My current laptop has been running for over 3 years. It is starting to get a little slow though. Might have something to do with a start menu so full, it won't fit on my 1920x1600 screen.... I think the trick is to never install anti-virus stuff. I never have, and I've never had one virus. Most of the times i've had to fix someones computer it was the damn mccaffnortonspersky stuff.

Damir - Friday, October 19, 2007 - I had a same problem before... 3-4 months then it all halts down to near death and I have to reimage. It's always the same story and a whole day goes to fixing it all up again. It's a no brainer since I made an image with VS, Office, Adobe stuff, etc. ready, but there's always a ton of stuff that needs to be done. Sometime last year I tested a CCleaner thingie and haven't touched those images ever since. When things get a bit slow I just run that little bugger and clean a registry few times after I've uninstalled all the crap that I tried out and forgot. It even helps You remove programs, startup apps and a whole lot more. Then it's back to speed again. Try it out, might work for You as well... Ohh, and for that anti-virus part, same here... I don't have any anti-virus programs installed. I just keep one on a U3 usb-stick and that runs automatically whenever I plug it in. Quick memory scan and that's it... Have fun

Matt Blodgett - Friday, October 19, 2007 - Last month I reinstalled XP for the first time on a machine I built 3 years ago. This was right after I went through a flurry of BIOS updates and video card driver installs and uninstalls trying to get a certain PC game to run without issues.

Josh Stodola - Friday, October 19, 2007 - Dang dude, I think "bad luck Chuck" is a total understatement! I have had my machine (3.0Ghz P4 hyperthread, 512 MB of ram, yes only 512, and a 200 GB HD) running XP SP2 for well over two years now and I have NEVER had to re-image. Never even thought about it, that would be such a tragedy becuase my hard drive has a lot of stuff on it. I have never even had to hard boot, I kid you not. And I do tons of crap on my PC. I can have VS2005, Photoshop CS2, uTorrent, Outlook 07, Skype, and 5 instances of IE7 running seamlessly. Shut down uTorrent and then I run Counter-Strike: Source (which is a hog, let me tell you) usually without any problems. It is my opinion that the key to a happy computer is to forget about anti-virus cpu-hogs and don't run Windows as an administrator.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000891.html

And I second Damir, go get yourself CCleaner becuase that program is effin amazing. I run it at least once every 2 weeks.

http://www.ccleaner.com


Hope your luck turns around for you because it sounds like a hellish time to me.

Best regards...

Dave Savage - Friday, October 19, 2007 - It's funny how you can do everything in your power to prolong the existence fo your current operating system, but somehow it always catches back up.

Troy Tuttle - Friday, October 19, 2007 - I've noticed that I don't have to do nearly as many re-images since I've stopped building my own custom boxes and just go with a mainstream Dell model. Hardware and device drivers cause more problems on machines than the OS and installed apps could ever hope to harm. I think it's crazy to have to re-image a machine every 4 months. I have so much stuff to install that it would take me two days to accomplish. So, if you work 20 days in a month (business days), you guys are willing to spend 1 or two days every 80 days to rebuild a machine? My last two laptops have run for more than 24 months each before rebuilding (one was because of HD failure). How to do it? 1. Start with clean, standard hardware, with clean device drivers. No funky stuff like tuner cards that allow you to operate your fridge while chatting on a shortwave frequency to a guy in Germany at the same time recording a TV show from your cable provider. 2. Only install what is necessary. If you need to experiment with software installs ....... Virtual PC anyone? 3. Don't customize your install with 3rd party screen savers, desktop images, or themes. Keep it simple, keep it clean, and keep it fast. I'm amazed at all the crap the average professional software developer has installed on his development box. Use the wife's machine for that junk. Software development takes long enough without stopping to rebuild infrastructure every 4 months. Life is too short for that.

josh - Friday, October 19, 2007 - i've gone as long as 10-12 months on an installed, but I've also done several installs on the same machine in 2 weeks. I really need to use vmware more for stupid stuff like trying Orcas.

josh - Friday, October 19, 2007 - btw, my wife thinks i'm incompetent with computers because of having to reinstall things. Tells me how no one else she knows has so many problems and never have to mess around with their computers. Yep, sticking to email and surfing would make me a better techie I guess. maybe I should call my friends to ask how to turn on the computer, and use the cd tray for a cup holder.

Ben Rogers - Friday, October 19, 2007 - It sounds like you're cursed. From systeminfo:

Original Install Date: 10/28/2004, 11:08:17 AM
System Up Time: 6 Days, 23 Hours, 28 Minutes, 41 Seconds

The system up time isn't very long since I just applied Windows updates.

Steve Bohlen - Friday, October 19, 2007 - I have never really understood what exactly the people who find they need to frequently re-image their windows boxes are actually doing with them.

I have a Windows 2000 box that has lasted 6 years, an XP desktop on its 5th year, and an XP laptop that's on year three. And yes, I do REAL work on these systems all the time, including development, web-surfing, playing games, etc. And I consider myself someone who quite often installs trial apps, evaluation software, and a host of other things that soon find themselves uninstalled.

Anyone who tells you they need to reimage their PC every 5-6 months (or anything approaching that) needs to go to sys admin school and learn how to manage their tools :)

Proper care and feeding of your PC isn't an optional part of using this tool -- its essential (unless you are a huge fan of the "installing XP progress bar").

D. Lambert - Saturday, October 20, 2007 - I used to have this problem - I probably rebuilt once a year. I try to use VM's for as much "junk" as I can -- as a software developer, I'm always installing something to try it out, or working with betas or whatever. Not only can I just wad up a VM and start over if I need to, but they also have great tools to just roll back to a snapshot. You can also use VM's for really important stuff, and mess around on your main computer, so rebuilding the main computer isn't that big a deal - you re-connect to your VM's and you've got the important stuff back again.

The Other Steve - Saturday, October 20, 2007 - "This was right after I went through a flurry of BIOS updates and video card driver installs and uninstalls trying to get a certain PC game to run without issues."

Must have been BF2. It died on me in September, and I used it as an opportunity to reinstall my box. Strangely, I haven't reinstalled BF2, so don't know if that would have fixed it.

I rebuild about once a year. Not because things stop working, but just because that's about when I upgrade something like video or motherboard and I just find it easier to start over.