I purchased my current desktop PC back in 2010. And my last serious effort to upgrade it to Windows 8 was in 2012. I’ve never done any upgrading on this PC, as far as I can remember, and I’ve never done a wipe & reinstall of Windows on it either. It’s still working reasonably well, but it’s pretty slow to start up now.
It can get to the login screen in a reasonable amount of time, and from there to the desktop reasonably quickly. But, then it takes a long time before it’s really “ready” to launch any non-trivial applications. I’m not sure I have a terribly good explanation for that, but I guess there’s too much random background stuff starting up after login.
My current plan is to clone my boot drive over to an external USB drive, then do a format & clean install of Window 8 on the boot drive, then reinstall apps and copy data back from the USB drive to the boot drive. Well, I tried the initial clone today, and that failed, probably due to a hardware error on the external drive. So, now I’m trying a full format of the external drive, just to see if that works, or if there’s a real problem with the drive. Well, it turns out that it takes a very long time to format a 1 TB external USB drive. I’m not sure why. But, either way, I’m stuck until that’s done. So tomorrow, if the format works, I’ll try the clone again.
I’m not sure at what point I should just cut my losses and buy a new PC, with Windows 8 pre-installed. But I’m definitely not ready to give up yet! If it turns out that the external drive I’m using is no good, I’ve got others I can try.