Windows 10 He has been with us for a little over six years. Windows 11 has succeeded, with smoother performance and a more modern interface. However, internally, both systems continue to share many elements, and the vices of the past are still present.
One of the main problems with Windows installations is that, over time, the operating system may become slow or have problems. In versions like Windows XP this was much more evident, but with the increase in power of modern computers and improvements to Windows, this has been reduced.
Before it was advisable to format frequently
In the past, something that was recommended to do with some frequency was format the computer to do a clean installation from scratch of Windows, with a frequency that was recommended to be around a year. There were various reasons for doing so.
Among them we found that a computer could be infected by undetected viruses, since the antiviruses of a few years ago were not perfect and there were some threats that escaped. Formatting from scratch allowed to kill those viruses.
A failure that continues to be present today is that programs create many unnecessary files on Windows. Some are deleted after uninstalling them, but it does not happen like in Linux that everything is deleted, but some traces remain. These files accumulate on the computer, and can occupy several additional gigabytes on our storage drive, and even slow down the computer. Thus, when storage space was vital, reinstalling the operating system from scratch was vital to recover those precious gigs, since it was more convenient than having to go looking for junk files.
The slowdown of the operating system With the passage of time it was a reality in the era of hard drives, where if we installed many programs and did not check what was running at the beginning, we could have to wait minutes to be able to use the computer.
Review from time to time programs that were running at startup it was essential. Now, with SSD drives, having dozens of programs does not affect the use of the operating system, since we can use it from the beginning comfortably while they are being opened. Today’s program loading problems are more about latency than speed.
But not anymore
Windows has also become more flexible when it comes to making reinstallations. Currently we can reinstall the system without losing programs that we have installed, or do a clean installation and that all previous files are stored in the folder Windows.old in the event that we need to recover any.
Windows 10 has also gained a lot in stability. Gone are the times of Windows 7 or 8.1, where one day when you start your computer you could find a black screen and have to recover a previous backup. Doing a clean installation is not necessary if we have not had a serious problem, such as an incompatible driver that we cannot uninstall.
In short, if you have one windows installation that you keep under control in terms of installed programs, you frequently do a cache clearing, you have an SSD, you use a good antivirus (Defender itself is great) and keep an eye on what is running at startup with Windows, you will not have to install the system from scratch.