Computer Repair and Sales Blog

Reinstall Windows or just repair it?

Today we had an interesting question brought to us by someone who stopped in to see us on the way back from another computer repair shop.  “Is it normal to have to reinstall Windows every time my computer has a problem?”  He went on to say that every time he brings his computer in they have to wipe his computer out and start over again and tell him that “you should reinstall your Windows at least once a year anyways”.  It concerned him because they wiped out all his games and personal information and left him with a computer in pretty much a useless state.

I realized that’s a question/concern that’s likely on many people’s minds, so I’ll address it here.

First, the challenge is obvious.  As a business owner you can’t afford to have a technician formatting your computer all the time and reinstalling Windows.  It takes days to get it set back up again, you have to spend hours searching for your files and digging through disks to find your programs.  You have to reconnect it to your network and server, reinstall your printers.  You lose hours and hours of productivity, all which cost money.  As a home owner, you lose all your saved games, you have to set everything back up again.  It’s a huge nuisance no matter how you look at it.

Obviously I couldn’t comment on his specific case because I didn’t have the computer on my bench.  What I can do is comment on our own experiences at our shop.  We are a group of very good computer repair technicians and there are very few occasions that we have to reinstall Windows.  Ten years ago it was true that you had to reload your computer once a year or it would go south on you.  Times have changed.  We are able to fix most problems without reinstalling.  I’ll give two examples of what I mean:

Someone brought in a tower with a faulty motherboard that needed to be replaced with a new one.  The manufacturer doesn’t make boards for this computer anymore and few after market boards exist for it.  For many computer repair shops, this is an automatic reload because the computer will blue screen on startup.  Either that or they’ll try to sell you a new one and have you start all over again.  In our case, we swapped out the motherboard with a much better quality motherboard, repaired his Windows installation (including addressing the blue screen problem) and now it’s back up and running as though nothing ever happened.  It looks and works exactly as it did before the problem started.

In another case we had a business client bring in a workstation with a nasty System Fix malware on it.  It deleted all his shortcuts, Start Menu and Quick Launch, disabled his control panel and desktop and hid all the files on his computer.  It was displaying numerous errors about failing to write to the hard drive, display errors, etc. and offering to ”fix” these new found “problems” for a small fee.  Again, in many computer repair shops this is an automatic reload.  Our client, as an insurance agent, had huge amounts of information, shortcuts and programs he couldn’t afford to be without for any length of time.  We removed the malware, recovered all his shortcuts, rebuilt his menus, fixed his desktop and at the end of the day he took it back to his office without losing a thing.

As you can see, if the answer to most of your computer repair troubles is “reinstall Windows”, it’s probably worth getting a second opinion.  Bring your computer to us for another look.  We are highly skilled and experienced computer repair  technicians that can help you with just about any problem.  And at the end of the day, heaven forbid the damage is far too great to repair (it does happen on very rare occasions), we will back up all your stuff first, including your email addresses, favorites, documents, etc.  After the reinstall of Windows we’ll reinstall your Office and copy all your stuff back to the proper folders on your computer to help you minimize the impact.  Bring in your programs and we’ll even reinstall those and download the driver for your printer.