Remember the old days of computing? I bet you do. It seemed like every few months, we were told to completely reinstall our Windows operating system to keep things running fast and smooth. It felt like a necessary chore, a ritual to keep our PCs from slowing to a crawl.
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But what about today, in 2025? Is this still a valid piece of advice, or is it an outdated myth we can finally put to rest? A recent deep dive by Will Smith might just shock you with its results.
According to his tests, the short answer is a resounding ‘no’. On a personal Windows 11 desktop, a machine with a powerful Ryzen 9800X3D and 64GB of RAM, there was almost no noticeable difference between a heavily customized, year-old system and a clean, fresh installation.
In fact, for some tasks, the older, more populated machine actually performed better! This seems to fly in the face of everything we’ve been told for years, but the data doesn’t lie.
📊 The Surprising Benchmark Results
When looking at the benchmarks, the performance difference was minimal. Single-core tasks showed only about a 3% difference, and multi-threaded applications were even less affected. What’s truly incredible is that Adobe Premiere, a program that can be quite demanding, ran 8% faster on the older setup. Even in gaming, the differences were subtle.
While a fresh install saw a 2.5% improvement in **Cyberpunk 2077**’s benchmark, the old machine actually had a tiny advantage when visual settings were cranked up with path tracing enabled. This suggests that for most of us, a clean install won’t give us the dramatic performance boost we might have experienced with older operating systems like Windows XP.
🧐 Who Still Needs a Fresh Install?
So, who is this old advice still for? Well, as the testers point out, this isn’t an exhaustive scientific test. Will Smith is a power user who knows how to keep his machine running well.
But unless you’re loading up your computer with a million startup programs and dozens of Yahoo Toolbar-style crudware, it seems that a Windows refresh won’t give you the dramatic performance improvements you might have seen 10 or 15 years ago. Today’s operating systems are far more robust than they used to be, and a simple refresh won’t provide the dramatic results you saw 10 or 15 years ago.
Works Cited
Crider, Michael. “Does reinstalling Windows really boost performance? Let’s bust a PC myth.” PCWorld, Aug. 2025, pp. 23-24.
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