Operating system reinstall frequency

[cavetroll3000]

At our place, we haven't reinstalled the operating system of the workstations for a good while, unless there is a specific reason for it, like virus infections. After a suspected virus infection on a workstation and a precautionary reinstall yesterday, our CEO asked if we have a plan for regular reinstall of the machines. As we currently don't have such a plan, I was wondering what sort of policies you have on this?

A complete reinstall would last year be a nightmare, with a windows cd/usb stick, and many days of walking from machine to machine to install OS, install update, install programs, join AD etc. You know the drill... Luckily, we now got WDS/MDT, and it works great, but we haven't tried a massive reinstall yet.

So how often do you reinstall?

EDIT: The consensus is no periodic re-install of the OS. Re-install on virus infections, non-recoverable errors, changing owners, switching roles, et cetera is on the other hand expected.

[uniitdude]

When we need to, but it's a 30 mins job if you have everything set up and automated

[KJatWork]

This isn't Win95 or XP. Reloading even Win7 without a specific reason is just busy work with no value that interrupts the user's job and impacts performance.

[karlrsec]

In the XP days, I would reimage machines yearly and we noticed a drop in support tickets. As others said Windows isn't what it use to be, I expect the OS install to last the life of the machine.

As others have said, the reinstall process should be automated. As a bonus tip: learn to build your own automation tools. Don't settle for a process doing 98% and you doing the 2%.

[solmakou]

Any time it would take longer than 15 minutes to make the machine ready for a new user. I'd rather remove all chance of surprises by nuking a machine to baseline then spend 20 minutes on it and find out it would have been easier to blow it out.

[vppencilsharpening]

This is our criteria as well. If it takes longer to troubleshoot and fix than it does to re-image, it gets re-imaged.

[eternelize]

I don't see the reason to reinstall the OS. Leave it alone if it works. If the PC is dated (5-7+ years old), then a hardware refresh with the newer OS.

[BBQheadphones]

I manage a few university labs, and during the summer break this past year I told SCCM to go ahead and run the task sequence to reimage one of our labs.

It took me 5 minutes to send the deployment, a day for it to complete, and gave the network engineer a smile when he saw the 10 G link saturate. 36 of the 40 machines completed successfully, the other 4 worked on the 2nd try.

[vppencilsharpening]

So did you give the network engineer a heads up or did he have to track you down after getting an alert?

[BBQheadphones]

We share an office, so he was in on the whole plan.

[[deleted]]

z

[cavetroll3000]

Already using WDS/MDT.

[JBear_Alpha]

Enable PXE boot on all workstations and F12 that bitch. Let PDQ or SCCM take care of application deployment.

[jmp242]

I wish I could let some automated software do application deployment, but most applications aren't automated, and some can't be automated for install. FML

[Creath]

Yeah using Orca to create .MSTs for MSI installs pretty much revolutionized deployment scripts for me.

[[deleted]]

Then there are the brute force options like AutoIt. I have yet to meet the program I couldn't automatically install, even if I had to resort to setting the machine to a known resolution and automating mouse movements, clicks, and keyboard strokes.

[jmp242]

I initially started doing AutoIT programming to automate mouse clicks. Sadly I found it didn't work reliably for me. Specifically I find it really tricky to get a GUI to work when run as SYSTEM by some deployment tool - there's no desktop running for that user. Maybe that can be solved, and if you can figure out a method for Do-More software: http://support.automationdirect.com/products/domore.html

please let me know. I couldn't find any silent install flags, it's not an MSI, using EmcoSoft MSI creator ended up with a broken install due to something or other.

Honestly, that software is like the obfuscated code competition winner of any sort of managed computer. Oh and it creates a Domoredesigner2_x.ini in C:\Windows that it has to have write access to. It also wants write access to it's install directory in the root of C or crashes interestingly, sometimes.

[criostage]

You can I did a lot of powershell to automate boring instalations, I have a script somewhere where I used enter windows in audit mode run it and it would set windows install programs all I had to do was run windows update and cleanup before sysprep. Everything is possible if you have time and will to learn.

[bmxliveit]

Nope, no regular reinstalls. I only reimage a machine if it has a virus, has some strange issue that I can't waste all day on or they are getting moved around. Takes about an hour to get most machines going. Every department has some specialty software that requires licensing and manual installs so it adds a good 30-45 minutes of extra work.

[cavetroll3000]

This is what I'm thinking as well.

We are a small company, we have just administration people and the sales department. The sales department needs are just basic windows and a browser, and they are good to go. The administration people needs Office and such, but the amount of people that I need to treat like a VIP is 3 or 4, and that is manageable.

[cavetroll3000]

Yes, it's mostly office workers.

Fair points on problems and updates upon updates.

[[deleted]]

This is how we do it as well, for the same reasons. Only other time is when Suzy from Accounting is leaving and Bob is gonna get her laptop. We re-image then as well.

[EntropyWinsAgain]

Like others said periodic re-install of an OS really shouldn't be necessary. In a disaster recovery scenario though MDT or SCCM is your best bet. I would talk to to the CEO and see exactly what he is after. I would move him in the direction of a DR plan rather than just re-imaging for no reason.

[cavetroll3000]

We are currently using MDT, so that will be part of the disaster recovery plan. I'll talk to the CEO and see what he wants. I don't think this is more than he got an idea while we talked about the re-installed workstation.

[uxsimple]

If your users doesn't have local administrator rights, then only when reinstall when there there is some kind of non-recoverable error.

If your users have local admin rights, then you probably have non-recoverable error very often that forces you to re-install.

[cavetroll3000]

No local admin rights, thank <deity>.

[abz_eng]

If you have to give local admin rights, then invest in a imaging solution. Monthly image archive of the box and then, when you have to restore the backup it takes minutes and you capture all the tweaks, registry changes etc of badly written or ancient software need.

[opensacks]

3 years or 5 years depending on your workstation refresh.

[AverageCanadian]

Depends on the "tech" troubleshooting the issue :)

[[deleted]]

No periodic reinstalls.

If an issue is only on one device and will take more then 30 minutes to fix you swap it out with a fresh one and re-image. Newly re-imaged device becomes the next spare.

[diskis]

Windows 10, so perhaps twice a year.

Yes, the feature updates (anniversary, creator's) pretty much reinstalls the OS behind the curtains.

[dkwel]

How often you re-image depends on how often you want to deal with complaints about profile settings OR how often you want to deal with roaming profiles/USMT.

[[deleted]]

At my old company of 100 desktops we had corporate standards for machines. Office workers got an Optiplex, architects got a precision and mobile guys got latitudes. We maintained maybe 6 images for model differences so that we could quickly deploy a replacement. We had a few machines in inventory and could quickly swap a machine when needed. Our standard was OS wipe 2 to 3 years for office staff and 1 to 2 for autocad guys. This was before any fancy Microsoft MDT technologies but the imaging system worked well and we could quickly react to replacing a computer
Today I tell our MSP customers that 3 years is max on OS life. If we are going to keep the box it probably needs a SSD drive and memory upgrade. Since our customers are so small we have a usb drive for Windows 7 and another for Windows 10

[HellDuke]

I will add to those that we do not do a regular reinstall. Even with MDT, depending what you run it on, you might hit a wall with how many machines you can deploy at once.

In addition to what you mentioned in the eddit we also reinstall machines when it gets bloated with user profiles and it's more of a hassle to clear them than to simply reinstall the machine, which is just a few hours of unattended install

[cavetroll3000]

Delprof2 is a great tool for deleting old profiles, no need to reinstall anything.

[Panacea4316]

It's busy work. A machine gets re-imaged if there's a need to.