How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer at DVinfo.net

Kelly Huffaker · February 4th, 2013, 12:08 AM

For those of you wedding videographers that shoot mass amounts of weddings a year, I was wondering how often you guys do clean reinstalls on your workstation computers? Once every year? couple years? The reason I was asking was because some videographers I've chatted with said they NEVER do. They just upgrade their computers every 5 years or so.

Mike Hammond · February 4th, 2013, 08:31 AM

I upgrade every so-and-so years - for instance when I started editing DSLR footage.

But in between I do defrags, registry cleanings, file clean ups, restores, disc checks, blah, blah, blah. Never had a problem yet and I would highly recommend a nice schedule of digital maintenance like this to keep a machine going.

Jeff Harper · February 4th, 2013, 10:26 AM

I do it when performance begins to decline enough that I can tell the difference. This is usually at around 6 months or even a year, it just depends. I don't do it for the sake of doing it. I used to do it every few months, but I found it was unnecessary.

I do not run virus protection, never have. If my internet gets buggy, which can happen, I will do a clean install at that point.

My idea of a clean install is a full formatting, ie., a complete zeroing out of the hard drive that takes an hour or two.

Jeff Pulera · February 4th, 2013, 10:45 AM

If your edit machine is solely dedicated to editing - meaning no internet, no email, no other apps, no updates, you "just edit", and you keep temp files and cache cleaned and drives defragged, you could theoretically go for years! In other words, just use the machine as an "appliance" and it is trouble-free. The Newtek TriCaster video switchers are Windows-based under the hood, and if you don't mess with things, they will run a good long time without issue.

We do from time to time get calls from NLE workstation customers that will claim to still be happily using the workstation we sold them 6 or 7 years ago, having never connected to the internet or done ANY upgrades. They just keep working when you don't mess with things.

In my own case, I install way too many little apps and such and use the machine as an all-purpose email, web browsing, iTunes, etc. machine and find that about once a year things deteriorate to where I need a full reinstall. In fact, I am overdue as the last several weeks things have gotten progressively worse and I'm having a lot of problems editing. I don't mind reinstalling Windows and Adobe so much, that goes pretty quickly - it is all the other little stuff, like email and dozens of other apps, many electronic, that require me to keep track of the downloaded files AND the license keys. Ugh.

John Knight · February 4th, 2013, 01:23 PM

My workstation (Thruster2000) is totally off the grid. No Adobe, MS updates are going to screw with my baby. All non-essential services are disabled (dhcp, networking, themes etc) Runs solid and reliable 24/7.

I transfer anything I need to upload via USB stick onto my online machine which I use for printing covers, email, games, watching porn and torrenting.

Dave Partington · February 4th, 2013, 01:38 PM

I've never had to reinstall a Mac from scratch, though I am sure others probably have.

I have had to do it to Windows computers over the years, and is one of the reasons I no longer use Windows on a daily basis.

Panagiotis Raris · February 4th, 2013, 01:44 PM

i rarely, if ever update. and i keep a backup copy of my SSD on an old HDD, so if anything goes awry i can simply connect and boot from the backup hdd and clone over the messed up drive with the original clean working image over the screwed up one. Eventually ill get another SSD and clone the clean image, and just swap them back and forth and copy over the corrupted one in the background. much more efficient.

Eric Olson · February 4th, 2013, 01:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dave Partington

I've never had to reinstall a Mac from scratch, though I am sure others probably have.

I have had to do it to Windows computers over the years, and is one of the reasons I no longer use Windows on a daily basis.

I had to reinstall last summer because of hardware failure: the iMac HD completely failed. A few months ago I upgraded the system disk in the Windows machine. The only reason reinstalled from scratch was because I thought it would be easier than figuring out how to move everything to a new disk. In retrospect, I'm not sure it was easier, but it was not that difficult either.

Dave Partington · February 4th, 2013, 04:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eric Olson

I had to reinstall last summer because of hardware failure: the iMac HD completely failed.

To me, that's a reasonable reason for a complete re-install, but it's hard to blame the OS for a hard disk failure ;)

Craig Terott · February 5th, 2013, 08:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Eric Olson

I had to reinstall last summer because of hardware failure: the iMac HD completely failed. A few months ago I upgraded the system disk in the Windows machine. The only reason reinstalled from scratch was because I thought it would be easier than figuring out how to move everything to a new disk. In retrospect, I'm not sure it was easier, but it was not that difficult either.

When a system HD (HD with OS) is failing, there are usually warning signs before complete failure (on Mac and Windows). Everything will freeze, including the cursor. The freezes will reoccur more and more frequently until the drive won't boot.

Put your OS and applications on an enterprise rated drive. Such as: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/770860-REG/Western_Digital_WD1003FBYX_RE4_Enterprise_Hard_Drive.html

Use SuperDuper! (or equivalent) to make a bootable clone and update the clone every few months or so.

Nigel Barker · February 5th, 2013, 09:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dave Partington

I've never had to reinstall a Mac from scratch, though I am sure others probably have.

I have had to do it to Windows computers over the years, and is one of the reasons I no longer use Windows on a daily basis.

I'm with Dave. I have a Mac & then I don't need to worry about "defrags, registry cleanings, file clean ups, restores, disc checks, blah, blah, blah" as above.

Noa Put · February 5th, 2013, 09:50 AM

Quote:

I'm with Dave. I have a Mac & then I don't need to worry about "defrags, registry cleanings, file clean ups, restores, disc checks, blah, blah, blah" as above.

Weird, me neither but I have windows 7, is that normal? :D

When I buy a new pc (about every 3-4 years) I install windows, all programs and all important updates and then disconnect from the internet and I only connect again if I have no other choice. (like with tmpgenc software) Then I make a image with acronis and start editing for one year, at the end of the wedding season, when all my backlog has cleared I delete all contents from my editing drives or move it to backup drives, reinstall windows using the image I made in the beginning of the year (takes 15 minutes) and I"m ready for another year.

Mac users are always the first to complain about how problematic windows can be but I actually never had a OS issue since I started using windows 7 pro nor did I have to mess around in the registry, defrag or whatever. Even windows xp pro never gave me any issues, only windows 98 did.

Eric Olson · February 5th, 2013, 11:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Craig Terott

When a system HD (HD with OS) is failing, there are usually warning signs before complete failure (on Mac and Windows). Everything will freeze, including the cursor. The freezes will reoccur more and more frequently until the drive won't boot.

My poor drive failed suddenly and so badly that the iMac wouldn't even enter the firmware screen with the bad drive installed. After fixing the iMac, I tried the bad drive in a PC out of curiosity and the PC wouldn't enter the BIOS screen with the bad drive installed either. LOL, I've never seen such a bad drive.

According to the recent study on HD failures by Google

http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

if you have SMART scan errors, reallocation counts, offline reallocation counts or probational counts the drive will surely fail soon, but lots of drives fail without giving any such errors ahead of time.

Sometimes hardware or software upgrades are significant enough that reinstalling the OS from scratch is easier than modifying an existing installation. Every time I've done this, I'm amazed at how much I had previously customized the old installation. It still takes quite a bit of work to get the new installation running as smoothly as the old one.

Warren Kawamoto · February 5th, 2013, 11:39 AM

Using Windows 7 and Edius, I never had to re-install. Come to think of it, I don't defrag either, although maybe I should. Everything has been running smoothly for the last 3 years. Sometimes my computer is on 24/7 when rendering animation files, but usually it's on 18 hours a day.

Don Bloom · February 5th, 2013, 03:09 PM

the last time I did a clean reinstall was....when I built my new edit machine a couple of months ago and upgraded my software. My previous machine was almost 5 years old, never did anything to it and it ran great. Still does but just not enough horses to do XDCam and AVCHD. I doubt I'll be doing anything to this one either. If it ain't broke, I don't fix it.

February 4th, 2013, 12:08 AM	#1
Kelly Huffaker Regular Crew Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: Pasco Washington Posts: 128	How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer For those of you wedding videographers that shoot mass amounts of weddings a year, I was wondering how often you guys do clean reinstalls on your workstation computers? Once every year? couple years? The reason I was asking was because some videographers I've chatted with said they NEVER do. They just upgrade their computers every 5 years or so.

February 4th, 2013, 08:31 AM	#2
Mike Hammond Regular Crew Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: West Orange, NJ, U.S. Posts: 163	Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer I upgrade every so-and-so years - for instance when I started editing DSLR footage. But in between I do defrags, registry cleanings, file clean ups, restores, disc checks, blah, blah, blah. Never had a problem yet and I would highly recommend a nice schedule of digital maintenance like this to keep a machine going. __________________ Mike Hammond http://www.yourcinematicwedding.com \| http://www.storyboardgroup.com

February 4th, 2013, 10:26 AM	#3
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer I do it when performance begins to decline enough that I can tell the difference. This is usually at around 6 months or even a year, it just depends. I don't do it for the sake of doing it. I used to do it every few months, but I found it was unnecessary. I do not run virus protection, never have. If my internet gets buggy, which can happen, I will do a clean install at that point. My idea of a clean install is a full formatting, ie., a complete zeroing out of the hard drive that takes an hour or two.

February 4th, 2013, 10:45 AM	#4
Jeff Pulera Major Player Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Milwaukee WI Posts: 691	Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer If your edit machine is solely dedicated to editing - meaning no internet, no email, no other apps, no updates, you "just edit", and you keep temp files and cache cleaned and drives defragged, you could theoretically go for years! In other words, just use the machine as an "appliance" and it is trouble-free. The Newtek TriCaster video switchers are Windows-based under the hood, and if you don't mess with things, they will run a good long time without issue. We do from time to time get calls from NLE workstation customers that will claim to still be happily using the workstation we sold them 6 or 7 years ago, having never connected to the internet or done ANY upgrades. They just keep working when you don't mess with things. In my own case, I install way too many little apps and such and use the machine as an all-purpose email, web browsing, iTunes, etc. machine and find that about once a year things deteriorate to where I need a full reinstall. In fact, I am overdue as the last several weeks things have gotten progressively worse and I'm having a lot of problems editing. I don't mind reinstalling Windows and Adobe so much, that goes pretty quickly - it is all the other little stuff, like email and dozens of other apps, many electronic, that require me to keep track of the downloaded files AND the license keys. Ugh. __________________ Jeff Pulera Safe Harbor Computers

February 4th, 2013, 01:23 PM	#5
John Knight Major Player Join Date: May 2008 Location: Auckland, New Zealand Posts: 588	Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer My workstation (Thruster2000) is totally off the grid. No Adobe, MS updates are going to screw with my baby. All non-essential services are disabled (dhcp, networking, themes etc) Runs solid and reliable 24/7. I transfer anything I need to upload via USB stick onto my online machine which I use for printing covers, email, games, watching porn and torrenting.

February 4th, 2013, 01:38 PM	#6
Dave Partington Trustee Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: York, England Posts: 1,323	Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer I've never had to reinstall a Mac from scratch, though I am sure others probably have. I have had to do it to Windows computers over the years, and is one of the reasons I no longer use Windows on a daily basis. __________________ Qualified UAV Pilot with CAA PFAW Aerial Photo / Aerial Video \| Corporate Video Production

February 4th, 2013, 01:44 PM	#7
Panagiotis Raris Major Player Join Date: Apr 2010 Location: Reading, PA USA and Athens, Greece Posts: 269	Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer i rarely, if ever update. and i keep a backup copy of my SSD on an old HDD, so if anything goes awry i can simply connect and boot from the backup hdd and clone over the messed up drive with the original clean working image over the screwed up one. Eventually ill get another SSD and clone the clean image, and just swap them back and forth and copy over the corrupted one in the background. much more efficient.

February 5th, 2013, 11:39 AM	#14
Warren Kawamoto Trustee Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Honolulu, HI Posts: 1,435	Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer Using Windows 7 and Edius, I never had to re-install. Come to think of it, I don't defrag either, although maybe I should. Everything has been running smoothly for the last 3 years. Sometimes my computer is on 24/7 when rendering animation files, but usually it's on 18 hours a day.

February 5th, 2013, 03:09 PM	#15
Don Bloom Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 6,609	Re: How often do you clean reinstall your workstation computer the last time I did a clean reinstall was....when I built my new edit machine a couple of months ago and upgraded my software. My previous machine was almost 5 years old, never did anything to it and it ran great. Still does but just not enough horses to do XDCam and AVCHD. I doubt I'll be doing anything to this one either. If it ain't broke, I don't fix it. __________________ What do I know? I'm just a video-O-grafer. Don