How? I feel like every time I do my ~1 yearly Windows reinstall I need to google it and then alter half a dozen registry keys and a bunch of group policy settings, and some of them are the "old" settings now replaced with something even more vaguely named (probably on purpose).
Mine was from websites 7 days I think. Randomly stopped booting a month ago (bsod after updates).
Switched to cachyos - I've spoken with at least 5 people who have had the same bsod after updates situation in the last 6 months. If windows at least embraced proper update techniques like with immutable Linux - and enough polish to make the random bsod loop after updates impossible to accur without hardware damage id likely go back for my gaming rig at least - but right now, it feels like garbage ngl
I've used Windows as my primary desktop for ~35 years and I do my absolute best to housekeep, but I still need to reinstall about once a year or so. I'm militant about installing almost nothing on my primary PC and putting all the janky apps on another PC via RDP too.
The computer I'm writing this on, the earliest things showing in Control Panel were installed in February 2012. It's not a rarely used clean machine, it's a daily use home computer/plaything with a lot of stuff installed/removed over the years from application suites to dev environments and esolangs, to editors, viewers, inspectors, emulators, hypervisors, browsers, chat and streaming clients, game stores, networking tools.
That's not a reason for why I didn't need to wipe and fresh install Windows in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, which was what qingcharles was claiming he had to do.
If you need to reinstall Windows so frequently, have you considered giving Linux a shot? I switched 16 years ago and haven't looked back. Until recently, I used Ubuntu and I think I had to reinstall twice in 15 years, one of which was when I got a new laptop.
Last year I switched to NixOS and while my impression is that it's going to be much more stable even than Ubuntu, installation also only takes me 5 minutes. That is, 5 min until my system is in exactly the state I want, including installed software, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, desktop wallpaper, GUI theme, etc.
I'm not sure what you think happens if random programs are lying around - they affect nothing except waste a miniscule amount of space. I cleaned up the context menu once, probably the autostart once upon a time, search indexer is off and use Everything instead, antivirus is off ...
Of course I'm still on Windows 10 and will be for the foreseeable future.
My desktop running windows 11 started life as windows 7. Has been used on different hardware both amd and intel. Has been cloned multiple times. And the only problem was a recent windows update that beefed security so i couldn't access shared files on an older clone running on another hardware because of using same sid
Not the person your were talking to but at work the Windows machines have a bunch of MDM garbage on them that screws up the OS and requires reimaging every few months. For that reason I have a Powershell script to automatically set up a machine.
Honestly I should. Registry and stuff gets cluttered. Programs don't uninstall cleanly, or they change settings I can't find. On one machine I somehow set it up as a wifi print server or something and for the life of me couldn't find a way to turn it off. But it's such a hassle to setup a computer.
Unclean uninstalled programs also don't impact performance. Unless it really isn't uninstalled and still runs in the background, but that can easily be fixed by a person competent enough to reinstall Windows once a year.
Settings you don't find, will still be not found after reinstalling Windows.
In my case it's not about performance, it's about usability and disk space. And again, that time I somehow started a WiFi access point and couldn't find anything online to turn it off. That laptop also at some point had the new folder option get removed from the right click menu. I had to copy/paste one. There are a lot of weird things that can happen over the years.
What are the practical issues with "cluttered" registry? But also, you can use special apps to track installations and do advanced uninstallations for ~clean uninstalls. Likewise, you could even spend time tracking settings.
So yes, still a hassle, but nothing comparable to setting/reinstalling everything from scratch, that's just pure waste
Maybe I shouldn't have said cluttered. More like programs mess with things and don't always put them back. There are a lot of Microsoft support forum posts that had to reinstall Windows to fix weird issues that only started after the install
It's been a while but from what I remember the easiest way to block this was by disallowing outbound network requests from search/the start menu in the firewall settings. It worked across all versions of Windows I tried it on.
Click Start, type something to bring up search results, click the kabob in the top right (...), click "Search Settings", disable "Show search highlights".
Ha! This is the first time I've even tried the Win10 Search bar in months after constant disappointment from it, and it doesn't even load for me nowadays:
