The Complete Guide to Windows System Restore (It’s Better than You Remember)

source – lifehacker.com

Most of us remember Windows System Restore as a lame-duck feature from Windows XP; when it seemed we might benefit from using it, it never quite worked how we expected. That’s no longer the case.

Windows System Restore is an awesome system recovery tool, and it’s included with Windows for free. It’s the ideal solution for rolling back bad drivers, fixing when buggy software breaks your PC, or simply rolling you back to a previous point in time. If you’ve still got a bad taste in your mouth from the lackluster XP version of System Restore, it’s time to take a look at it again if you’ve upgraded to Windows 7 or Vista.

System Restore in Windows 7 Is Better than XP

If you’ve ever tried the XP variety of System Restore, the uselessness of it probably left a bad taste in your mouth. Setting a system restore point was often agonizingly slow, and when it came time to actually attempt a system restore, it rarely did what you wanted it to do. But if you’ve upgraded to Vista or Windows 7, you should really give System Restore another chance.

Back in the XP days, system restore simply used a file filter and copied files around, but since Vista, it uses the Shadow Copy features built into Windows—essentially, Windows can create a snapshot of your drive as of a certain point in time, which can then be used later to restore your PC should anything go wrong.

Read entire article at lifehacker.com …

The How-To Geek deleted his system32\drivers folder for fun, and used System Restore to easily get the PC running again. His geeky articles can be found daily here on Lifehacker,How-To Geek, and Twitter.