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A friend told me that everyone should format our drive once a year... I did more than once a year cos I got viruses on http://www.freeze.com/ I downloaded animated wallpaper there and my browser got hijacked
Do NOT download anything from that site everyone!!!!!

I never formate my harddrivers. Lol

if i don't get any problem whit my pc..once a year...
..i think is better for windows/pc

Since I try a lot of new software and do Beta testing, I format my OS Partition and reinstall the OS every 3 months. Because as I installl and uninstall a huge number of programs, the size of my Program Files Folder is 10GB, I've Games Partition of 20 GB seperate. All this 10 GB of applications when installed and uninstalled, leave a huge amount of waste data. This slows down the system, so I'm forced to reformat and reinstall the OS.

I usually format when I actually need to i.e. the computer is slowing down or get highly infected. Funny thing is one time I formated by computer, but before I could update it with security patches.....I got infected heavily. Thus, I had to reformat right away.

Possibly every 2 - 3 months..

I like to keep my computer clean.. i have an external drive to hold all my important files so i jus have to reinstall everything after a clean format

@frisky168: If you had a good anti-virus you wouldn't get infected, theese days its nuts going around !

As for the hard-drive it really depends, I do a lot of testing of software and OS'es so I a part of my hard drive gets always formatted but mostly my Linux partition is intact and doesn't need actual formatting allmost never.

@broodfaun: I do a lot of system installing at work and as a tip always unplug your ethernet cable before reinstalling windows, after windows WITH anti-virus is installed then you can plug your ethernet and update first the anti-virus, then windows.

-V-

I only format my hard drive when I absolutely need to, Only formatted my Windows XP computer once, when Windows Installer wouldn't work, and I couldnt use Windows Update to make it work.

i only defrag mi comp i cant be bothered formating

I haven't tried reformatting my computer athough it's almost 3 years old. System maintainence software keeps the performance of my computer resonabably well.