Try a clean install before you send hardware off to landfill, urges Barry Collins
We now live in a society that’s as disposable as a used tissue. Clinging to perfectly functional hardware until it breaks, instead of instantly replacing it when a new model comes out, now marks you out as something of a weirdo rather than a sensible, frugal type.
I’ve seen this transformation in my own family. When I was a kid, we had the same Sony telly for well over a decade. There was nothing wrong with it, so there was no need to replace it. Now, my dad’s been through three sets in the past 10 years. At the first sign of a laptop or tablet starting to slow down, he’s on the phone asking me to recommend a new one. We don’t put up and make do, we ship out and move on.
The attitude has infected the younger members of Clan Collins, too. A couple of weeks ago I came downstairs to find my five-year-old daughter repeatedly tapping the screen of her mum’s Android tablet. “It’s crashed again,” she sighed. "We need a new one.”
Actually, we don’t. We just need to sort out the one we've got. Android tablets are like Windows PCs: load them with enough apps and they eventually clog up and struggle like a Blairite trying to accept Jeremy Corbyn. My poor Nexus 7 must be feeling the strain of the 40-odd games installed on it - almost all of which barged their way into Android’s notifications menu so that they could try and sell my five-year-old a batch of tokens for $50 a pop, as well as robbing the tablet of some much-needed memory.
With the tablet barely functioning under the weight of the dross, I performed a factory reset, clearing everything off and returning the tablet to the sprightly state it arrived in two years ago. A few Android updates later, and we had a perfectly usable tablet once more. It’s not quite as nimble as the day we bought it, because each new version of Android is a little more demanding, but it’s not ready for landfill yet, either. A 15-minute clean-up was all that was required to bring it back to life.
The same is true of PCs. Admittedly, a Windows reinstall will certainly take longer than a quarter of an hour, but in my experience, it’s generally worth the hassle and it will save you a few hundred quid. It's even easier on Windows 8 and 10, which let you ‘refresh’ your PC by uninstalling all the potentially troublesome software while retaining all your personal files. The whole process can be completed in as little as 10 minutes and it leaves a file on your Desktop listing all the software applications that it’s removed. Just make sure you’ve got discs, installers and serial numbers for all the apps you want to keep on your PC before you start the process, or you will end up volleying it into the wheelie bin.
I dread to think how much perfectly serviceable hardware ends up in landfill because people foolishly assume that their phone, tablet or PC has had it, when all it needs is a wipe. It’s the hardware manufacturers who clean up when we can’t be bothered to.