Windows XP System Resore
 

Why does a large portion of the computing industry have a dire hatred for System Restore? It's saved my ass countless times. It seems like every other computer tech guy I talk to swears against it and laughs at me for ever touching it.

My sister's computer's mouse and keyboard stopped working one day. I messed around, reinstalled some drivers, all that. Didn't do a damn thing. Doing all that shit with the arrow keys sucks. Anyway, I pulled a System Restore to the day before, everything works again. Perfectly. Hasn't messed up since.

One time I couldn't play DivX movies on my computer anymore because of a codec issue that the Nimo codec pack had with my current drivers. I tried EVERYTHING. Uninstalled ALL of my drivers, including video, all of it. Reinstalled everything. Video still corrupted. Did System Restore to two days back, everything works again. Flawlessly.

And for the best ones: Internet doesn't work, video is fucked, computer is running 50% as fast as usual, windows close by themselves, music is distorted. Didn't even try to fix it. System Restore to 5 days back, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, is fixed again. Was it a virus? Doubtful, but whatever it was, System Restore fixed it all. Why do people hate this little tool so much? It's saved me hundreds of hours of painstaking monotony. Any thoughts/opinions?

I enjoy the hours of painstaking monotony. :lol:
Windows restore corrupts way to easily
I often delete my index.dat files
to erase my computer tracks.
That causes restore not to work.

Hmmm... System Restore. It's a bit like Stevie Wonder running the hurdles. Skydiving with bedsheets. Javelin catching. All of those, but the Stevie example feels most appropriate. Step step *hop* step step *hop* step *thud!*. And SR encourages the behavior.

If computers are mysterious and uninteresting. If you don't have to know why something didn't work. If computers often seem like a Bermuda Triangle of wires & plastic, then SR may get you out of a bind. But if you have the tools and need to know why something failed - avoid rather than recover - SR is like putting off your taxes. Procrastination as a feature.

There. I think I put myself firmly in the crowd you were speaking of. :)

Not to say it's completely useless. We all have our favorite socket set. Sometimes the weirdest wrench can save your butt.

I've never gotten it to work for me. I'm sticking with Norton GoBack.

Everytime I tried to use it it fails. Though even that fact does not deter me from making a system restore point before a questionable install., You never know it may save my computer's ass. I keep a Crash and burn file just for quick reference of all drivers and other things needed to get up and running after a reformat.

A lot of things hide in the system restore points. If you have spyware at the time it was stored, viruses, ect, they will be restored when you restore, worst yet, things can enter into the system restore points. The system restore points are not visible to the windows API, but can still be accessed through other means and files can be hidden in them.

personally:
LOVE the system restore
i've had spyware that i absolutely could not remove and i knew exactly when adn where i got it. one system restore later and bammo, it's gone and i was able to delete the offending file.

i've had some problems that took forever to fix and at the end, i would still end up just using the restore feature

and yeha, it may corrupt, but 1, i've never had that happen and 2, my comp saves a restore point every day. I don't jump for it at the first moment of trouble, but when i realize a piece of spyware just won't come out w/out 15 extra programs...well, it's time to try

I dont know. I always heard that it slows down your comp a bit so I always disable it. I bet it does cause its another thing running in the background. I like disabling as many services and programs as I can to keep my computer speedy. Plus I never had any serious problems with my comp I couldnt figure out myself.

I actually think that I'm pretty good at troubleshooting XP problems and that I'm pretty good at preventing XP problems. But System Restore has worked very well for me in the past. The only problem I usually have is that certain restore points don't work, so I have to pick another date. That's time consuming but still faster than doing a fresh install. I like cJoe's idea of making a crash-recovery disk. I need to do that soon. But I do believe that System Restore should always be tried before giving up and reformatting and/or reinstalling XP. I downloaded an app from LimeWire a few months ago that within minutes of running the app my box started to freak out big-time. Going to Safe-Mode and running System Restore totally fixed the problem. Maybe that's the secret, using Safe Mode. I don't know, but IMHO System Restore is alway a viable tool.