No, you are not "supposed to" do that once a year. Personally I think
it's a good thing to know; how to rebuild your computer in the event of
a catastrophe but it's very unlikely that you're at a state where a
rebuild or reinstall like that is necessary. Especially not because
it's been a year.
If you want the experience, and like I said, IMO it's good experience to
have, go ahead and do it. But do NOT do it just because it's been a
year. Wherever you got that from is/was wrong.
Since you're "just learning", this is a great opportunity for you to
learn some more, much more useful information. Start by learning more
about:
-- Backing up your important data; how to, when to, why to, etc.. THE
most important thing y ou can do!!
-- firewalls; software and router types
-- good antivirus protection
-- Spyware protection and scanners (sometimes also known as malware
detectors)
-- How to surf safely and use "Safe Hex"; a term you can look up on
Google.
-- The most obvious reasons for a machine becoming slow. That's going
to wind up being protection from malware(viruses, trojans, worms, etc.).
Those may feel pretty complex at first, but they'll quickly
straighten themselves out in your mind and you'll catch on to the hang
of it all<g>.
Overall, it's seldom necessary to reinstall windows and in my case,
although I rebuilt from scratch a few times just to know how to do it, I
NEVER have to do that. Initially I used XP's backup to do my backups,
but when I heard about Imaging software, it quickly got my attention and
that's what I use now. If anything catastrophic happens, and it has, I
can re-image my disk from a saved image and in about 23 minutes I'm back
up and running vs the 2 days it took me to reinstall XP and all my other
programs and customizations, etc..
I actually had a hard drive go completely belly up on me; platters
wouldn't even try to spin. I got a new disk and popped my emergency
recovery bootable image in the drive, and ~40 minutes later I was back
up and running as though nothign happened.
Once a month I have a scheduled Full backup run and each night in
between, an incremental runs. They are stored on my external drive.
Periodically when there have been substantial changes to the machine, I
burn an image to DVDs so I'll always have it, because my External Drive
can't hold more than a few months worth of backups at a time, and
besides, it's prone to data loss just like any other drive. So I also
keep DVD copies now and then just in case.
HTH,
Twayne
