Windows, love it, hate it or tolerate it, has definitely changed concerning what’s considered "standard maintenance" for the OS these days.

A few things that applied to older Windows do not apply to newer editions, or not as often. Here are a few of them.

Reinstall the entire OS once every 6 months

It was standard practice to do this with Windows 95, 98 and ME because, well, you had to. The MS-DOS based editions of Windows did something that I called "destabilizing itself" just from normal use. Once destabilized enough, you had to reinstall the whole thing, as in format C, pop in CD and do the routine.

NTFS-based Windows (which is XP to present for most people) do not require the once-every-six-month reinstall routine. In fact, as long as Windows isn’t completely destroyed by spyware/malware/whatever-ware and you haven’t hacked up the registry too much (which can mess up XP easily), it’s probably true the hard drive would fail before Windows would.

Defrag once a week

This one is a bit weird because it depends which edition of Windows you’re using, and it jumps around a little bit.

Windows 2000 is stable enough to where you never need to defrag it. Yes, that sounds insane, but the OS was designed that well. In my experience, you really have to work at it to mess up a Win2000 NTFS partition to the point where it needs defragmentation. 

Windows XP on the other hand does require routine defragmentation in standard once-a-week fashion.

Windows Vista and 7 do not need weekly defragmentation. You can stretch it out to once every 30 days or even once every 90 days and you’ll be in good shape. However you should defrag more frequently if you routinely handle big-big files (like HD video imported from a camcorder).

Why do Vista and 7 not need defragging as often as XP? Mainly because Vista and 7 handle files much more efficiently. Transactional NTFS for example, when used, is a "super journaling" of files so to speak that allows for better file copy/move completions among other things.

Why does 2000 handle files so well? Mainly because compared to XP it runs very "lean" (far less Services are running at any given time) and doesn’t ‘touch’ files nearly as often as XP does.

Free space = Faster Windows

With older Windows it was generally true that if you were under 20% hard drive space free, you were in trouble because the swap file would figuratively speaking "go nuts", resulting in blue-screens. There was even the school of thought at one point that you should never use Windows on a drive that has less than 50% total space free.

What happened on previous editions of Windows is that if you committed to copying files that exceeded available local drive space, the OS would slow to a crawl, run out of memory, give you an error message, and on attempt to clear the error OS would crash (bear in mind the scenario was not exclusive to Windows whatsoever).

In addition, yes it’s true that having more space available did allow older Windows to run faster.

Windows Vista and 7 are ‘smart’ enough to where you can throw as much data as you want at it, and if the OS detects you’re going to run out of space, you’ll be warned appropriately – even if you’ve already committed to copying files that exceed existing space. The OS won’t slow down to a crawl, you’ll get your warning message, and you can simply cancel the file transfer and go about your business as you normally would.

Compared to older Windows, modern Windows runs the same speed (as in optimally) no matter how much data is present on the system; the only exception would be if you are literally just a few GB away from filling up the drive completely.

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