Mine was from websites 7 days I think. Randomly stopped booting a month ago (bsod after updates).
Switched to cachyos - I've spoken with at least 5 people who have had the same bsod after updates situation in the last 6 months. If windows at least embraced proper update techniques like with immutable Linux - and enough polish to make the random bsod loop after updates impossible to accur without hardware damage id likely go back for my gaming rig at least - but right now, it feels like garbage ngl
I've used Windows as my primary desktop for ~35 years and I do my absolute best to housekeep, but I still need to reinstall about once a year or so. I'm militant about installing almost nothing on my primary PC and putting all the janky apps on another PC via RDP too.
The computer I'm writing this on, the earliest things showing in Control Panel were installed in February 2012. It's not a rarely used clean machine, it's a daily use home computer/plaything with a lot of stuff installed/removed over the years from application suites to dev environments and esolangs, to editors, viewers, inspectors, emulators, hypervisors, browsers, chat and streaming clients, game stores, networking tools.
That's not a reason for why I didn't need to wipe and fresh install Windows in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, which was what qingcharles was claiming he had to do.
If you need to reinstall Windows so frequently, have you considered giving Linux a shot? I switched 16 years ago and haven't looked back. Until recently, I used Ubuntu and I think I had to reinstall twice in 15 years, one of which was when I got a new laptop.
Last year I switched to NixOS and while my impression is that it's going to be much more stable even than Ubuntu, installation also only takes me 5 minutes. That is, 5 min until my system is in exactly the state I want, including installed software, window manager config, keyboard shortcuts, desktop wallpaper, GUI theme, etc.
I'm not sure what you think happens if random programs are lying around - they affect nothing except waste a miniscule amount of space. I cleaned up the context menu once, probably the autostart once upon a time, search indexer is off and use Everything instead, antivirus is off ...
Of course I'm still on Windows 10 and will be for the foreseeable future.
My desktop running windows 11 started life as windows 7. Has been used on different hardware both amd and intel. Has been cloned multiple times. And the only problem was a recent windows update that beefed security so i couldn't access shared files on an older clone running on another hardware because of using same sid
