By George Norman
Added on 08 Sep 2009(909 Views)



The development team at Microsoft had a simple goal in mind when they came up with the system restore feature in Windows: to allow the user to easily undo harmful changes made to the operating system by restoring its settings and performance to a previous moment in time. By oversimplifying things we could compare this to time travel – you computer does not work now, but it did yesterday, so System Restore will return all the settings to the moment when everything worked just fine.

Windows 7 is definitely a better OS compared to its predecessors – I’m talking about XP and Vista. Still, you may run into a problem that requires the use of System Restore. It pays off to take the time and create a System Restore point from time to time. Here’s how you can do this in Windows 7:

Step 1. Minimize all open windows and running applications. Better yet, close all open windows and shut down all running applications. Right click on My Computer -> in the dropdown menu select Properties.

Step 2. In the menu that shows up click the System protection link.

Step 3. The Windows Properties window should have popped up. Locate and click the System Protection tab.

Step 4. In the bottom right hand corner of the screen, next to Create a restore point right now for the drives that have system protection turned on there’s a Create button. Click it.

Step 5. Type in a brief description for the System Restore point -> click Create.

Step 6. The operating system will now create a System Restore point. This may take a while so be patient – the amount of time you have to wait depends on how much data you have stored on the computer, on the computer hardware’s performance and so on.

Step 7. When presented with a prompt informing you that The restore point was created successfully simply click Close and you’re done.

Tips and warnings
You are very well advised to create a System Restore point every time you install a new piece of software or every time you want to make a significant change to the operating system.
You might also want to check out these other tutorials:
How To Create a System Restore Point in Windows XP
How To Restore Your Computer to a Previous Moment in Time in Windows XP
How To Turn Off System Restore in Windows XP



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Tags: Microsoft, Windows 7, System Restore

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