That is (unfortunately) a standard Windows prescription, but I'd say it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. I ran OS/2 and then its successor eCS for many years, and never ever had to reinstall it. I refuse to do this with Win: to get all the very many apps and user preferences / customizations back in the way I wanted would take me a couple weeks of work, with great loss of productivity until I did. As far as I'm willing to go is to restore the last working Acronis image, and rework it from there. My biggest failing in this has been in not making those partition boot images often enough, so that they remain more up-to-date.
Rather belatedly, I installed 8.1 onto a spare HDD, just to test drive it and wring it out a bit. (Incidentally, that is the non-commit procedure I would recommend for 10. Keep it a sidebar experiment, only.) Win 8 has been hugely annoying, thus far, as I attempt to "Seven-ize" it as much as possible. It boots up slower than 7 for me (on the same hardware), and I haven't found much advantage in terms of stability either. That is to say, 7 has been quite stable, but for one glaring deficiency. For me, great damage has been done -- several times, on different systems -- by seriously defective Win Updates. Sometimes these offerings are even recalled from circulation by MS, although this is rarely acknowledged by them. You have to hunt around online to uncover the gory details. Often, the damage cannot be successfully recovered from or rolled back. That's where the boot partition images prove to be essential. From what I'm reading, this lousy track record has not been improved with 8 -- much less with 10.
I am leaning towards doing something a friend has done for years now: having a tower system built with plug-in hot-swap drives. That should greatly facilitate drive cloning and backup, as well as allow for multiple OSes, in a setup that is much safer than multiboot-on-the-same-HDD configurations, which I've tried in years gone by. But this will be more of a hobbyist / tinkerer sort of deal.
Jordan
From: Bill Troop
To: xywrite@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, August 3, 2015 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: still running in Windows 10
I am sure it is a good idea to do a clean install every six months
or so, but I can never bear to do it.