minimal effort of backing up important files and then wiping and starting afresh
Gosh. Well, for a very very
very simple setup maybe.
When I get a new machine it takes about a week of work before it's usable, and about a year before it's doing everything I want it to (there are all sorts of rarely used applications etc that I forget about when initially copying stuff from the old box to the new ones, some of which I
might still have the original floppy disks for if I look hard enough). Not "minimal effort" in my case.