Would you buy this software or hardware?

[Brian Ellis]

Imagine you see some publicity for a hypothetical hardware item or software that interests you. The price is right, so you look on some forums to see how present users are faring with it. You find they are largely satisfied and that it does as promised, but that half the satisfied users had to reformat their hard drives, reinstall Windows from scratch, then the new item and finally all their other applications before it would work.

Would you buy this item?

[Nowhere]

Any details what is it, Brian?

[Brian Ellis]

It is a purely hypothetical situation that I've outlined. Nevertheless, there have been cases in the past (and probably still are) of this kind of thing, often as a result of upgrading (e.g., unidentifiable remnants of an earlier model in the registry interfering with the new one). I've been badly bitten once in the past, where only a reformat would get the drivers of an item of hardware working, despite eliminating every trace I could find in the registry and everywhere else. I may once again be such a victim, according to a colleague, along with hundreds of others suffering from the same problem. This has not yet been proved, so no names, no pack drill.

[Indiana]

Well, that's the exact procedure you should go through when changing from an nVidia gfx-card to an ATI one - and most likely vice versa as well.

[Brian Ellis]

Well, Indiana, in my past case, it was for an upgrade for the drivers of a card, both of which (old and new) were not only from the same manufacturer, but had closely related model numbers.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

if it was an ati or nvidia card then you could use Driver Cleaner

[Brian Ellis]

AI

It was neither of these cards, but the maker did have a driver cleaner, but this didn't work, either!

[Indiana]

Originally posted by ayoub_ibrahim
if it was an ati or nvidia card then you could use Driver Cleaner

Still in the ATI fori there are some people that did use Driver Cleaner and/or Detonator Destroyer with various strange problems (mainly TVOut/Overlay related) after the switch from nVidia to ATI - which can nearly always be cured with a reformat.
Both, ATI and nVidia create such a mess in the registry AND the system32 folder that it's really hard to get this really cleaned up - and I guess this is not possible automatically in every case.

It's the same as if you wanted to really clean the system from a once installed Creative soundcard...

[GNEP]

Arrgghhh. Yup Creative take the biscuit in these stakes. And I guess the answer to the question "would I buy another Creative soundcard" is "no" so in a way that is an answer to Brian's question. But then I did...

[mutz]

Aaarrghh, growl, snort. I had this with a Pinnacle PCTV Pro and 5.5O software. Snort, aarrhgh, growl!

[Technoid]

hm....
Could it have something to do with this thread from the past?

http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33360

[agallag]

I usually reinstall whenever I change any major hardware item. I just did it when I pulled out my sblive and started using the onboard sound (via chipset, nothing but trouble, much better now). I was overdue for a reinstall anyway though... Much less hassle that way. It's much easier to do when you have a server to backup to though

[Brian Ellis]

Some people have long memories.

[Admiral]

forced to:

-you get a faster hard disk and want to put the OS on it

highly recommended:

-when going from Intel to AMD or the other way around
-changing motherboard chipset manufacturer on AMD system
-changing motherboard chipset manufacturer on Intel system
-CPU + motherboard generation upgrade (BX/i815EP+P3->i845+P4...)

recommended:

-changing motherboard chipset model by same company (i845->i875, SIS 735->746FX...)
-changing CPU on same motherboard
-changing video card manufacturer
-changing sound card manufacturer or model by same company (see Creative)


Maybe there are more, but that's all I could think of right now.

[Brian Ellis]

Admiral

On the whole, I would agree, but I wasn't thinking of a radical upgrade when I posed the question, but simply adding a new device.

I'll beg the question: what about upgrading a video card from the same manufacturer of the same series? For example, if you had a Whizzbang graphics card type ABC123 and you upgraded it with a Whizzbang ABC125 because it had a faster processor and more memory, both AGP-4, would you consider it reasonable to reformat and reinstall from scratch? Would you buy it, if you saw that many had to do this?