The IT Nerd

I’m really not sure where this came from, but there’s a bit of computer lore that says that you have to reinstall Windows from time to time to ensure that it runs at maximum speed. In all my years of supporting computer users, I have never seen the value of doing this with one exception that I’ll get to in a second. If you follow the maintenance tips that I posted earlier this week, there’s really no practical need to reinstall Windows. It also helps if you run an anti virus solution that is CPU friendly such as AVG 2013 (which I’ve reviewed before) or Microsoft Security Essentials (which I’ve written about before) which I recommend because they are so CPU friendly.

Now, the one exception is someone like me who tests software and hardware either for customers or for reviews on this blog. That might slow down your PC  because of all the installing an uninstalling. But I have a way around that. I use virtual machines for that purpose. Since I run Parallels Desktop on my Mac, I’ve created three VMs. A Windows XP VM, A Vista VM, and a Windows 7 VM. The great thing about VMs is that I can test something and then easily revert it back to a “virgin” state. You don’t need a Mac to do this as Parallels has a version for PCs called Parallels Workstation. Not to mention solutions from VMWare called VMWare Fusion for Mac and VMWare Workstation for PC.

This entry was posted on November 9, 2012 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Tips with tags PC, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.