Fellow Windows users. How often do you do a clean install just to get rid of old forgotten junk. I think it's getting close to when I probably should

Same here, windows apparently is like a ticking time bomb.
In terms of storage usage.

Before windows 8 : Every 6 months or so.
Since windows 8 (8.1 and 10) : not once in the last 4-5 years.
Sometimes I reinstall Visual Studio tho, when it reaches 50 GB space.

Every major update, more or less. I love watching 2tbs of nvme space be eaten up by trash, dust, .old and temp files I apparently can no longer easily take ownership of.

I'm honestly glad I'm only using it for games anymore.

Last installed my Windows 7 in 2016. Since it's cracked version with updates disabled, still going strong like as first day - just ocassionally run CCleaner to swoop junk files and unused registry entries.

Every 2 years or so

I don't.
Just use windows cleaner and sort downloads folder by oldest and select a bunch.

I usually don't have to since I like to keep it clean.

Personally just as @NoToJavaScript describes.
My mother's laptop is another story though but that's on her

never had to do that shit since 2010, last windows i installed native on my machine is dating from 2010, since then i just run Packer/Vagrant for windows related shit.

Windows is not even relevant anymore for gaming since you got Proton to run games on Linux. Admitted, some games run shitty on Proton with default settings, but it's tweakable and is often just a matter of environment variables when launching.

I don't use Windows at home anymore. Thank fuck, my house has been Windows-free for the last 6 or 7 years. Linux on both my and the wife's laptop, but I'm not above experimenting with less mainstream OSes such as FreeBSD.

Also, my current laptop is a Pinebook Pro. The different Linux distros available for it still have some rough edges but so far I'm enjoying the ride towrds a fully functional ARM-based laptop.

In work, I do use Windows… my last laptop's system image lasted well enough until the warranty ran out (after 3 years), and I got a new laptop.

@NeatNerdPrime
Whereas you can get it working, I'm really not crazy about the amount of wineprefix duplication I had to achieve basic stability across DX11 titles. In my book it still needs some work.

@SortOfTested true, however, let's be honest. Linux users always were the tinkering enthousiast. That being said I believe that, with every new proton release the stability and speed improves and as long the game is not superreliant on specific D11 stuff, it runs rather smoothly.

IMHO the problem with wine/proton is that it's being faced with all the shit microsoft has piled up over the years and call it an "operating system" and need to hack solutions for their shitty libraries. Basically wine is hacking around the mountains of shit.

@NeatNerdPrime
I mean, microsoft gonna microsoft. It's an emulation layer, for better or worse, that's always going to be painful, no matter what.

As much as I support the efforts and will keep fiddling, I'm far more excited about what the fpga community is churning out:
http://racketboy.com/retro/...

@SortOfTested oh i had no idea of this project! Thanks for this. I'll delve onto this deeper tomorrow on my day off.

My Win7 install is from 2010 and no issues. CCleaner every now and then, cleaned up the old restore points, that's it.

To this day, I do not understand why Visual Studio will not install on a separate drive.

I have a small OS specific SSD, 120gb. Visual Studio refuses to install on my 480gb storage drive.

So aggravating.

@wannabe This is asking for trickery… where does it install the bulk of its files? Something like "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio"? You could create the folder beforehand on your storage drive, and create a junction/link on your system drive pointing to the folder on the storage drive…

Or move %ProgramFiles%, not sure how feasible that is. Tools for the purpose can be found.

@SomeNone Sorry, I didn't explain properly;

I know it 'can' be done, but I usually only keep VS around for that occasional time I need it's build environment for some reason. I don't want to have to fiddle with it, given it's not my main IDE and I definitely don't want to troubleshoot mixing and matching drive locations when i could spend that time being productive.

I just like complaining that it isn't a one-click install to a different drive.

Only when upgrading to windows 10. I like that to be clean. But otherwise never.

People think it's necessary, but if you just keep your pc clean, there's no need for it.