For Linux, I almost never reinstall. Most of the package managers I've used don't make it too difficult to: * verify the checksums of everything installed * f

For Linux, I almost never reinstall. Most of the package managers I've used don't make it too difficult to: * verify the checksums of everything installed * find packages that no longer exist in any enabled repo * find packages (not explicitly installed) that have no reverse dependencies * find files no longer owned by any package As a result, I haven't had too much trouble cleaning up things that might be left behind. My longest running install is going on 11 years now, having been migrated between computers and to/from a VM 8 times. For Windows 10, I used to reinstall whenever explorer.exe would get stuck with a persistent bug where the metadata gatherer (eg. video thumbnails, mp3 ID3 tags, etc.) would take 10+ seconds per file and Explorer would freeze until it loaded the metadata for every file. I probably reinstalled 6 times before I got frustrated and threw explorer.exe in a debugger to find the cause. Turns out clearing a few registry keys fixes the problem: https://github.com/chenxiaolong/random-scripts/blob/master/clear-explorer-bags.ps1 https://github.com/chenxiaolong/random-scripts/blob/master/c... Nowadays, I reinstall Windows whenever my VR headset starts to drop frames for seemingly no reason (no Windows, SteamVR, or Nvidia driver updates).