How often should you reformat your computer?

Question

I have had several people tell me several diffrent answers and I really need to know the right one. They tell me to do it about every 6 months and then another one tells me not to do it too much because it will do damage to my hard-drive so please tell me which is right.

Answer 1

Using your computer will damage the hard. Constantly rebooting will damage your hard drive. How often you format depends on how many people use the computer and how much stuff you put on it. Could be as frequently as every 6 months or less or as little as every couple years.

Answer 2

Should I Reformat My Computer

Answer 3

There is no reason to format your computer's hard drive on a regular basis. The only reasons for formatting are an extremely severe virus/spyware infection or a desire to completely and permanently remove all of your data.

A much more healthy maintenance schedule would involve using a secure deletion program to delete sensitive files. If you are really paranoid about computer preformance, you could also defragment your hard drive on a monthly basis. Virus and spyware scans should be run once a week.

Answer 4

I have windows XP and It has been stable and running for 5 years.
With Windows 98 the computer would become corrupted with bad code and it would need to be reformated ect..
Now adays I would not tell anyone to reformat the harddrive unless they had a problem.

Answer 5

Some people (including myself) format their harddrive every few months. I do this to keep my computer running as fast as it can.
Over time, installing and uninstalling programs can leave files on the computer hidden deep inside. While this wont harm it at all it will slow loading times slightly.
As for damaging the hard disk, i wouldnt worry about 'wearing it out' at all. They last for years and years even under reasonably heavy loads.

Generally for the average user you wont need to format for a very long time, on the other hand if you are a keen IT user you might want to keep your computer in tip-top condition by formatting every now and again. Hope this helps!

Answer 6

You probably do not mean "reformat" your computer - or your hard disk...that would mean that you destroy all the data on it.

So I guess what you mean is to defrag your disk? There is a defragmenter software which comes as the part of windows. Defragmenting puts the files on your harddisk which are in different physical spaces into better places and this way creates more space in total and makes access more efficient and faster.

How often you should run the defrag software depends on how much you do with your computer, how many files you shift around. Once every six months is more than the average user does and should keep your hard disk in a good shape.

Answer 7

Reformat your computer?
The hard drive should be formatted only when you installed the operating system, and shouldn't need to be done at all after that.

If you mean doing disk-cleanup, or de-fragmenting, you can do that anytime. Most people do that if they notice a performance decrease, and it can be done whenever you like. Defragmenting doesn't harm the hard drive. (For that matter, neither does formatting). Hard drives are quite reliable devices these days with failure rates less than 1 in many thousands of hours. It should last longer than the expected lifetime of the operating system.

If you reformat your hard drive, you'll wind up with an unusable system, and you'll need to reinstall all of your programs from scratch.

Answer 8

reformatting the drives doesnot damage the Hard drive.If you have a virus or worms or some unwanted programs which you cannot remove it from your hard drive,better to reformat the drive.

Answer 9

For the best answers, search on this site https://shorturl.im/awzML

As often as you feel like putting everthing back in it. Won't hurt a thing, About every 6 months for me.

Answer 10

You should prepare a computer once, then aim to Never re-format the hard drive again.

If you wish to expand in the future, you can add a newer operating system on an available partition.

Install all operating systems oldest to newest in a dual or multi-boot scenario.