Back in the days of Windows XP and Vista, my computer felt sluggish and nothing seemed to fix it. I desperately searched online for solutions and one forum comment mentioned a "fresh copy of the OS" as a potential fix. As a teenager, the concept was completely new to me. My naive self had been using the same Windows installation for years, desperately trying to improve performance with endless defragmenting, temporary file purging, and driver updates. Even limiting startup programs didn't help.

So, after weighing the potential downside of backing up my shit (a responsibility that initially seemed daunting) - I decided to give it a shot.

The result? A revelation. While initially worried about the backup process...it turned out to be a valuable learning experience. In fact, it wasn't an inconvenience at all. Especially when I compared it to the benefits.

So I started what I call a bi-annual refresh.

Where I install a fresh copy of the operating system every few months. Here’s basically a run-down of what I do when I first log in.

• Download Firefox - despite some of my gripes (like this on bugzilla) with the software, it has been my default for far too long. The sync works amazingly well and takes care of everything else.
• Get myself a copy of Everything - because Windows search is still catching up.
• Head over to Visual Studio Code’s website and get a copy. Following it up with installing most other things like git, WSL, python, node or whatever else I happen to be working with at the moment.
• I usually don’t bother with the UI but toggling the dark mode system wide is crucial.
• Now that Windows ships with a night-light built in, I decided to leave flux off the list. Although it has been my friend for years.
• In theory I would go and manually toggle privacy settings. But I’m lazy. Thankfully there are some talented programmers who have it easy. I’ve cycled through some programs and settled on Shut Up 10. Does what it says and gets me through quickly.
• Photo Viewer has been forcefully banished. This is unfair and I must revolt. I do so by toggling the values of photoviewer.dll and bringing it back to life.
• The video player that comes built in is...let’s just say not my cup of tea. Media Player Classic has an open source fork called MPC - HC which supports a great number of codecs.

My stuff is backed up with Duplicati to manage the offsite backups, it comes with a command line tool which can pull random chunks from the storage bucket, decrypt them, and check the file hashes against expected values. There’s monthly images of my computer's primary drive replicated offsite.

The whole fresh install process is ridiculously easy and takes about 30 minutes - from starting to create a USB installation media to the last backup restore.