can formatting your laptop or pc a lot harm it?

Answer 1

No, you will not harm your computer when you format it, even if you do so often (it might actually be good for your system. Of course "Format" means wiping out the contents of your hard drive & reinitializing it to nothing (you might even want to do some partitioning before formatting? It only takes a few extra minutes). After that, of course, is reinstalling the OS, your hardware drivers, your software, and everything else (and I hope you saved all your personal data before erasing the contents of your hard disk? You haven't lost your hardware drivers I hope?)

Don't forget that after you have to update all your drivers and software, and tweak the settings to your preferences.

Doing this is very exhausting and time consuming. But I have heard of some geeks that take a short-cut by doing all this, then when everything is clean and properly configured, they take an image of the system (using Norton Ghost, or other similar software). So, actually, a 'reformat and reinstall' simply becomes a 'reformat and restore' -- what can conceivably take days can be reduced to less than an hour. (The geeks also say that you need to do a fresh reinstall of windows about every 6 months.)

So, if you are of the type to reformat and reinstall your system often, consider that shortcut.

:-)

Answer 2

Why would you even format your computer and what do you mean "format" because after the format you would have to reinstall the OS.
And no formatting is NOT good for the system.

Answer 3

Only in the sense that you will lose your data and must do a full install of the OS. Otherwise, doing such is good for the system as it clears that clutter you accumulate over time such as registry entries, extra running services, and objects that load into memory.