How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

For those of you wedding videographers that shoot mass amounts of weddings a year, I was wondering how often you guys do clean reinstalls on your workstation computers? Once every year? couple years? The reason I was asking was because some videographers I've chatted with said they NEVER do. They just upgrade their computers every 5 years or so.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I upgrade every so-and-so years - for instance when I started editing DSLR footage.

But in between I do defrags, registry cleanings, file clean ups, restores, disc checks, blah, blah, blah. Never had a problem yet and I would highly recommend a nice schedule of digital maintenance like this to keep a machine going.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I do it when performance begins to decline enough that I can tell the difference. This is usually at around 6 months or even a year, it just depends. I don't do it for the sake of doing it. I used to do it every few months, but I found it was unnecessary.

I do not run virus protection, never have. If my internet gets buggy, which can happen, I will do a clean install at that point.

My idea of a clean install is a full formatting, ie., a complete zeroing out of the hard drive that takes an hour or two.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

If your edit machine is solely dedicated to editing - meaning no internet, no email, no other apps, no updates, you "just edit", and you keep temp files and cache cleaned and drives defragged, you could theoretically go for years! In other words, just use the machine as an "appliance" and it is trouble-free. The Newtek TriCaster video switchers are Windows-based under the hood, and if you don't mess with things, they will run a good long time without issue.

We do from time to time get calls from NLE workstation customers that will claim to still be happily using the workstation we sold them 6 or 7 years ago, having never connected to the internet or done ANY upgrades. They just keep working when you don't mess with things.

In my own case, I install way too many little apps and such and use the machine as an all-purpose email, web browsing, iTunes, etc. machine and find that about once a year things deteriorate to where I need a full reinstall. In fact, I am overdue as the last several weeks things have gotten progressively worse and I'm having a lot of problems editing. I don't mind reinstalling Windows and Adobe so much, that goes pretty quickly - it is all the other little stuff, like email and dozens of other apps, many electronic, that require me to keep track of the downloaded files AND the license keys. Ugh.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

My workstation (Thruster2000) is totally off the grid. No Adobe, MS updates are going to screw with my baby. All non-essential services are disabled (dhcp, networking, themes etc) Runs solid and reliable 24/7.

I transfer anything I need to upload via USB stick onto my online machine which I use for printing covers, email, games, watching porn and torrenting.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I've never had to reinstall a Mac from scratch, though I am sure others probably have.

I have had to do it to Windows computers over the years, and is one of the reasons I no longer use Windows on a daily basis.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

i rarely, if ever update. and i keep a backup copy of my SSD on an old HDD, so if anything goes awry i can simply connect and boot from the backup hdd and clone over the messed up drive with the original clean working image over the screwed up one. Eventually ill get another SSD and clone the clean image, and just swap them back and forth and copy over the corrupted one in the background. much more efficient.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I had to reinstall last summer because of hardware failure: the iMac HD completely failed. A few months ago I upgraded the system disk in the Windows machine. The only reason reinstalled from scratch was because I thought it would be easier than figuring out how to move everything to a new disk. In retrospect, I'm not sure it was easier, but it was not that difficult either.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

To me, that's a reasonable reason for a complete re-install, but it's hard to blame the OS for a hard disk failure ;)

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

When a system HD (HD with OS) is failing, there are usually warning signs before complete failure (on Mac and Windows). Everything will freeze, including the cursor. The freezes will reoccur more and more frequently until the drive won't boot.


Put your OS and applications on an enterprise rated drive. Such as: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/770860-REG/Western_Digital_WD1003FBYX_RE4_Enterprise_Hard_Drive.html

Use SuperDuper! (or equivalent) to make a bootable clone and update the clone every few months or so.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I'm with Dave. I have a Mac & then I don't need to worry about "defrags, registry cleanings, file clean ups, restores, disc checks, blah, blah, blah" as above.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

Weird, me neither but I have windows 7, is that normal? :D

When I buy a new pc (about every 3-4 years) I install windows, all programs and all important updates and then disconnect from the internet and I only connect again if I have no other choice. (like with tmpgenc software) Then I make a image with acronis and start editing for one year, at the end of the wedding season, when all my backlog has cleared I delete all contents from my editing drives or move it to backup drives, reinstall windows using the image I made in the beginning of the year (takes 15 minutes) and I"m ready for another year.

Mac users are always the first to complain about how problematic windows can be but I actually never had a OS issue since I started using windows 7 pro nor did I have to mess around in the registry, defrag or whatever. Even windows xp pro never gave me any issues, only windows 98 did.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

My poor drive failed suddenly and so badly that the iMac wouldn't even enter the firmware screen with the bad drive installed. After fixing the iMac, I tried the bad drive in a PC out of curiosity and the PC wouldn't enter the BIOS screen with the bad drive installed either. LOL, I've never seen such a bad drive.

According to the recent study on HD failures by Google

http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

if you have SMART scan errors, reallocation counts, offline reallocation counts or probational counts the drive will surely fail soon, but lots of drives fail without giving any such errors ahead of time.

Sometimes hardware or software upgrades are significant enough that reinstalling the OS from scratch is easier than modifying an existing installation. Every time I've done this, I'm amazed at how much I had previously customized the old installation. It still takes quite a bit of work to get the new installation running as smoothly as the old one.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

Using Windows 7 and Edius, I never had to re-install. Come to think of it, I don't defrag either, although maybe I should. Everything has been running smoothly for the last 3 years. Sometimes my computer is on 24/7 when rendering animation files, but usually it's on 18 hours a day.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

the last time I did a clean reinstall was....when I built my new edit machine a couple of months ago and upgraded my software. My previous machine was almost 5 years old, never did anything to it and it ran great. Still does but just not enough horses to do XDCam and AVCHD. I doubt I'll be doing anything to this one either. If it ain't broke, I don't fix it.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I can't remember the last time I had to reinstall. Probably because of a bad hard drive or something. "Windows Rot" is largely a thing of the past and even then was generally caused by cheap and/or free software. Use your work computer for work and your play computer for play and you'll never have a problem.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

How do you do then the updates if you are not connected to the internet? I have 2 PCs one for everything ( internet, small applications, DVD burning, Photoshop e.t.c) and on only dedicated for editing but on this dedicated PC I also have internet just for occasionally web blousing. I do occasionally manual updated of win 7.

stelios

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

Connect to the internet, do the updates, disconnect again. I would have thought that obvious ;)

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

Dave

Is it a problem for this dedicated PC to be connected to the interneteven if you are not using it (I mean the internet)?
I am just editing but the PC stays connected.

stelios

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I run a pc with windows 7, I do the reinstall usually once a year. I guess I could have a mac and never do it, but then again, I saved about 2,000 dollars building my own PC workstation instead of having a comparable mac.

Worth it

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

id only do it every few years when i'd replace the PC with a updated one, i run win 7 on a desktop and a laptop and Vista!!! on a reserve/retired desktop.
I'm always connected to the net and it's pretty ok these days, anyone using windows 8 is there any difference for workflow etc.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I don't have a dedicated workstation, mine is used for everything. I also am not afraid to go anywhere or do anything with it, because fear keeps you for experiencing things. Now this also tends to lend itself to me mooking my computer up from time to time. But that's been the case since getting my Performa back in '95.

Like Jeff, I do it when performance changes. Typically I will notice small things not going according to Hoyle. When that happens, typically on a weekend, I back up all the data, and give it a flush and fill. Like Jeff I too zero out the entire drive. Then do a reload and watch how smoothly everything goes back in. I have had reinstalls go south, maybe from a hickup from the DVD. Anyways, you know soon enough it isn't right, so then do it all over again.

I was doing this almost every 3 months and this time around I am now out past 6 and still going fine.

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

No. Personally my machines are connected to the internet all the time. I was merely answering your question about updates :)

Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer
 

I recently had to do a complete OS reinstall on my machine after having software issues. Luckily nothing was lost and I'm happy to have saved all my projects. Doing a scheduled, maintance back up/reinstall i've found is a great way to keep the machine not only running the fastest (as it gets rid of tons of junk you'll never use again), but if forces you save your recent video productions too, which is always a great thing !