What good is it to do a format of your hard drive every so often?

Question

I am trying to prove to someone that formating your hard drive every now and then is a good thing.

Answer 1

That depends on what kind of system you have. It's not a great idea on a linux system, especially something like LFS or Gentoo.

But it's pretty much a good on windows. Windows acquires a lot of junk easily. The registry bloats fast because of all the horrible programs out there. Your start up entries, and so on bloat. Your computer becomes nice and slow.

A format cleans up everything, and gets you a nice unfragmented filesystem. Keeps up the performance.

Answer 2

if you reinstall windows. make a backup of the drive.if you have a problem. no need to reformat.just restore it back to the way it was.
reformatting the drive is a waste of time.unless the pc doesnt startup.also its good to defrag the drive once a month.I use magical defrag. it defrags when Iam not using the pc by itself.keeps everything in order.pc boots up quick and runs good.

Answer 3

with proper maintenance you should never have to re-format your hard drive
Because of the time involved along with the possible loss of files and necessary drivers, a re-format should only be used as a last resort when not being able to fix issues with viruses and Trojan worms and the likes

Answer 4

not really. Yes wndows weighs itself down over time with a bloated registry and your computer collects unwanted malware/spyware over time, but a reformat is overkill unless strictly necessary