Does reinstalling an OS (Windows, Mac, iOS) makes the computer faster ? Should we factory reset our devices every year ?
In: 3
Let me show you an example which is easier to understand.
Does visiting a dentist make your teeth better? It’s kinda yes and no question, right? If you ignored your mouth hygiene, then there’s a good chance visiting a dentist will make your teeth better. If you don’t ignore your hygiene it doesn’t make much difference, but the dentist may find and fix something hidden you didn’t realize.
Your question is the same. If you ignore the “installation hygiene” and you install everything, download everything, accept everything without reading it – good guess is that you will slow your PC over time with unwanted running software, multiple useless files here and there and such. Which can slow your PC. OTOH if you run & download only what you really need and you don’t accept every cookie out there, essentially you don’t need to reinstall the OS for a long time.
Back in college we did a bet about Windows XP(which was fancy new OS back then :)). We installed the OS, installed all the applications we wanted and then cloned the drive and hidden the cloned one. After 2 semesters(9 and something months) we did some testing and we couldn’t tell the difference. Sure, the used hard drive wasn’t exactly as fast as the “clean” installed one, but the difference was on a level of statistical error. Long story short the few believers got plenty of alcohol for the summer break 😀
Edit> additional information to the bet – yes, defragmentation was run at least once a month and the person was actually quite careful about all the webpages, downloads and install. They installed 2 more applications for projects.
Latest Answers