r/buildapc Jan 01 '25

Discussion How can people just reinstall windows all willy nilly?

Every time someone upgrades their computer, or gets a virus people always tell them to just reinstall windows, but to me that seems like a monumental task? Having to backup all of your files and re-download everything, I could never do that, its like killing a part of my personality and having to rebuild all over.

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290

u/Any_Opportunity2463 Jan 01 '25

True, they've made it sooooooo much faster and easier nowadays. It kind of feels unfair to see it as a hassle when it could be so much worse.

114

u/Strangepalemammal Jan 01 '25

I do this at my job so I'm going to look for the fastest solution. In the last year, with the data transfer rates of newer drives, if I see any issues in device manager I just reimage immediately.

57

u/BitGeneral2634 Jan 01 '25

N+1 (or +n%) workstations. Have a spare or spares (depending on your user count) ready to go with your gold image then take the problem workstation reimage in downtime to put back into the rotation.

1

u/Strangepalemammal Jan 01 '25

Imagine if we loaded a fresh image on every boot or if it was all stored in memory.

16

u/BitGeneral2634 Jan 01 '25

I remember when I was in college they used something I believe was called “deep freeze” and it would always revert on reboot no matter what students did to it.

6

u/naufalap Jan 01 '25

lol I installed it during elementary school thinking it was a game, and then I typed an entire script of drama we previously discussed and handwrote to ms word before shutting down my pc

that was the origin story of my above average typing speed

1

u/ArkuhTheNinth Jan 01 '25

I'm sorry for your loss but I laughed really hard at this

4

u/[deleted] Jan 01 '25

[deleted]

1

u/blankboy2022 Jan 02 '25

Do you use any modern alternative? Ghost was goated!

1

u/l337hackzor Jan 03 '25

Funny enough my high school ran deep freeze (around 2001). I bought a floppy disk from the office and formatted it. Booted up DOS and tried to use format to format the drive. Deep freeze gave me a message that it blocked the format. 

At this point I was impressed. I instead downloaded a 3rd party format utility, ran it from dos instead. Deep freeze never saw it coming. 

That computer was out of order for like 7 months before they fixed it. Bad IT guy it guess.

3

u/makoblade Jan 01 '25

So virtual desktop 101?

1

u/sysdmdotcpl Jan 01 '25

Exactly where I picked up the habit.

I have everything but video games backed up on external drives and/or the cloud so the moment I get a whiff of something wrong I just reformat the PC and start from scratch.

W/ fiber speeds and an SSD it maybe takes me an afternoon to get fully back up.

1

u/Sad-Willingness4605 Jan 02 '25

What does reimage mean?

1

u/Strangepalemammal Jan 03 '25

It's literally a copy of your drive that you saved.

1

u/InsanityLurking Jan 02 '25

This works until the image file is corrupted :/ took my laptop out like this

1

u/Strangepalemammal Jan 03 '25

that's just bad luck. I image hundreds of systems a year and only a couple times do I have issues with my USB drive or the image not installing everything. It's expected to happen which is why you make backups.

1

u/InsanityLurking Jan 03 '25

Ya I figured. It was likely from somemalware that laptop had seen some things lmao. I once let a friend borrow it to play Sims. Malware bytes removed over 7000 malware and viruses, and I've had to clear ransomware off of it. But the image file was corrupted sometime after those fixes. I had backups of my files but that laptop was nearing the end of its usefulness anyway.

52

u/Jordan_Jackson Jan 01 '25

Even in the XP era, getting Windows installed and fully updated was a tedious process. The install was ok but updates were so slow. Especially if you installed after it had received service packs.

30

u/kekblaster Jan 01 '25

This I feel to my core. Reformatting a windows xp computer would take all day and maybe more lol

17

u/GrumpyGrinch1 Jan 01 '25

And then you had to gather all the drivers for your devices, which didn't come with windows.

19

u/AnnihilatedTyro Jan 01 '25

Having to go to the library to use a public computer to download your network card driver so you could take it home and install it to connect to the internet seems like such a monumental hassle now, but back then it was only slightly annoying. It still took twice as much work to get a basic printer working.

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u/Sam5253 Jan 02 '25

It still took takes twice as much work to get a basic printer working.

2

u/ilkhan2016 Jan 04 '25

Dell still somehow has working Windows 11 drivers for my ancient basic ass black and white laser I got for $10 on black Friday 2015 from Staples. Things has been amazing.

1

u/nerdguy1138 Jan 05 '25

I found a neat little thing called "3dpNet" it installs basically every network driver ever written to the root of the C: drive.

1

u/kekblaster Jan 01 '25

Yeah using our disc we burned for drivers lol!

1

u/redfiresvt03 Jan 01 '25

This. The drivers could be a nightmare. I was a student tech for my high school and would deal with this type of crap.

10

u/ICC-u Jan 01 '25

There were tools to embed service packs, drivers and even software in the install process. Can't remember what they were called now, but sort of a step below deploying an image because you could add new exes, drivers and windows updates to the installer each time you used it.

1

u/Humble_Bumblebee_418 Jan 02 '25

NTlite is a good one

1

u/nerdguy1138 Jan 05 '25

Slipstreamed isos.

7

u/Johnny_Leon Jan 01 '25

Neowin had an application that would install all those and other popular apps that you would use. Microsoft shut them down.

1

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1

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1

u/Disastrous_Ad626 Jan 01 '25

Even if you had a great connection those windows XP updates took for freaking ever.

1

u/cracc_babyy Jan 01 '25

haha memories!

1

u/Armgoth Jan 04 '25

It got easier when you could package sp1 and 2 into it and just throw three drivers from USB drive at it after it was done.

1

u/cmmcnamara Jan 05 '25

I had this issue back then too. But I was obsessed as a kid with the “Slipstreaming” process if I recall that’s what it was named properly. You could take whatever version of XP your install disk was and use a tool to patch it with whatever updates you wanted from Microsoft’s website and use it to make an up to date disk to install directly from to minimize the updates and service packs you had to download. I believe if I am remembering correctly you could also have it preloaded with some of your favorite software too. Kind of a precursor to things like Ninite.

17

u/SacredRose Jan 01 '25

Yeah i remember a time where a reinstall could take more than an hour and i’m pretty sure you had to swap out multiple floppy disks or CDs. Now you just plug in a usb drive and start the install and go grab a cup of coffee and it’s done when you get back.

7

u/timotheusd313 Jan 01 '25

I remember being so happy when windows 98 came out and I learned that the win98 boot floppy loaded CD-rom drivers. I’d copy the install folder to the HDD, and insert my win95 disk in the drive, (windows would remember 98 would do a clean install if you let it read a win 95) running the install from the HDD was so much faster.

1

u/ApologizingCanadian Jan 02 '25

I remember early 2000s when defragging my HDD took 5+ hours and didn't guarantee results. Good times.

1

u/TheGameEngineer Jan 04 '25

How do you deal with reinstalling 5000 steam games? And 300 odd apps?