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System Restore Points, or Disaster Insurance

Should your computer become completely overwhelmed with viruses and spyware, or malfunction for any other reason, you can opt to restore to an earlier point in your computer's lifetime. This is possible because of Windows Restore Points, a feature available on Windows ME and onwards. System Restore monitors your computer for any major changes, creating a backup whenever one of these changes occurs. A new Restore Point is created whenever new software is installed, key files are overwritten, and after every 24 hour.

Using System Restore

If you'd like to revert to a previous point, click Start, go to All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and select System Restore. Simply follow the wizard from that point on and you should be back in business at an earlier point in your computer's If you'd like to revert to a previous point, click Start, go to All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and select System Restore. Simply follow the wizard from that point on and you should be back in business at an earlier point in your computer's life.



Restore Points are created automatically, but if you'd like to make one yourself, go to the same place, and select "Create a restore point." All you have to do is give the restore point a descriptive name, and Windows will take care of the rest for you.

Creating a Restore Point yourself might be a good idea before any major change, such as a hardware upgrade or driver change. Windows may create a Restore Point because of these changes anyway, but it never hurts to be sure.

There are a couple of things to remember about System Re There are a couple of things to remember about System Restore:

• System restore only monitors changes in your system files
• Other files, such as your music and documents are unaffected - you won't lose them if you need to roll back your system

Using System Restore to get rid of viruses and spyware may or may not work. If a malicious program has embedded itself in a Windows system folder before a Restore Point is made, System Restore may in fact simply archive that virus and reintroduce it. In this case, you can try to delete it with an antivirus program. There are also companies that specialize in system backup and re and restoration.

Disadvantages

There are some disadvantages to using System Restore. Although it is configurable, the Restore Points tend to use a large amount of disk space. On Windows Vista, this amount is 15% of the total disk space. If you use up most of your available disk space, System Restore will begin to delete older restore points. Also, the process of creating the Restore Point may be a drag on the performance of your computer, and by using up your disk space, your computer may run slower.

The Restore Points can come in handy if a critical file has somehow become corrupted, or a setting change has made your system unstable. Using System Restore is a matter of personal preference; turning it off can save a good deal of space and time, while it can also save the day in certain cases.

One important point to understand is that System Restore is not going to backup your personal files. System Restore is used mainly to undo damage to the Windows system. System Restore will not touch files such as Word documents, photos, etc. For that, you'll want to use a third party archiving tool that actually backups and stores your personal files.

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