@Cassidy said:
@RichP said:
So, I could spend several hours over several days every year or so re-installing Windows.
Or you could have imaged it once you'd got your system build complete and used that as a recovery image.
I've never really understood this "yearly reinstall" mentality. I have gamer friends that believe nuke-and-rebuilt cleans out accumulated cruft and returns them back to a faster-running OS; I simply perform regular housekeeping to keep mine clean.
When I bought my current home PC, I was averaging 35 MB/sec from the disk. After two years of use, that had dropped to 11 MB/sec, no matter which file was accessed or what the system load was. Defragmenting the drive did nothing to help this. Reformatting and reinstalling the system restored disk performance back to 35 MB/sec.
This is anecdotal, but I have experienced this at work and at home -- it seems to be triggered by writing a huge number of files (tens of thousands) into the same directory. Filesystem performance goes to shit after that and cannot be recovered. I don't know why.
Most people though do not write tens of thousands of files to a single directory (even in my case it usually isn't something I planned to do).