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Working for several years as a deskside support technician System Restore has saved my client's valuable data and hard work on many occasions. System Restore is a utility that has been available on the last several versions of Windows. The utility saves copies of the system registry, programs and system files. If any of those get corrupted or are rendered unusable by changes or upgrades they can be restored to an earlier version prior to the time the problems occurred.

On Vista, System Restore is enabled by default. With the size of today's hard disk drives there should never be a concern with available storage space for System Restore's functions. There are some storage space requirements, however, that should be considered. System Restore requires at least 300MB of hard disk space for each drive being monitored and will use up to 15% of the available free storage on your hard drives. As new restore points are created older ones will be deleted, as necessary, to keep the space used under that limit. With hard drives running in the tens, and even hundreds, of gigabytes, these limits should not become an issue.

System Restore points are created at different times. When properly enabled, daily restore points are created automatically. Restore points are also created whenever there is a change in software or hardware on your system. You can also manually create a restore point at any time, although that shouldn't be necessary if System Restore is operating properly creating daily restore points.

If your system stops operating properly because of a change in files or other issue you can use System Restore to return your system to proper operation. To perform this recovery you need to log in as an administrator and start the System Restore utility. Once logged in as an administrator you select Start, then All Programs and System Tools. Under System Tools is where you'll find System Restore.

When you open System Restore you will be given the choice of a recommended restore point or the opportunity to select your own. If the recommended restore point is from a date and time before which the system was operating properly you can go ahead and use that and click "Next". If not, select "Choose a different restore point" which, when you click "Next" will give you a screen to select the restore point you wish to use.

Once you've selected the restore point by date and time you will be given a confirmation screen. Clicking "Finish" will give you a final warning to ensure that

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