What if you are working away on your computer and suddenly your aunt calls and says that her computer has a virus and wants you to wave your magic wand, through the telephone line and make it all better? Well, you would probably do the same thing I did and start walking her through the steps to download and run some virus scan and malware protection software. I even went as far as running the scan on my system too, so that I could actually walk her through each step.
Imagine the terror in my eyes when something in the process made my computer crash, hang, and refuse to boot. Fortunately, there is something called Windows 7 System Restore which uses System Protection which creates and saves points on our computers at regular intervals and also when we make system changes such as installing new software, patches, and updates.
So if you make a change to your system configuration and suddenly the system becomes unstable you can restore your computer to an earlier time. This is also helpful when combating issues created by virus problems. Let’s say that you get a virus from a file attached to an email. You’ve uninstalled the file and ran your virus scan software, but your system still isn’t functioning normally. This would be a good time to restore your computer to an earlier point.
The system changes will not affect your personal files, so it is a good idea to have a backup plan in place for your personal files, since System Restore is no help in recovering damaged or lost data. You can find System Restore under programs or go to your start menu and do a search for System Restore.
When you run system restore it will suggest going to your last restore point or you can click on next and choose a different restore point. There is also a scan for affected programs button, that you can use to see how different programs will be affected at that restore point. The scan will notify you of any programs that will be deleted or installed at that restore point and give you the opportunity to override these options.
Once you have made sure you have chose the correct restore point and software options click on run then you will get a warning saying once the restore is started it can’t be stopped. Go ahead and click on yes to continue. Your computer will log off and shut down to restart the restore. Once the restore is finished you should have a perfect running system again.
If for some reason the restore didn’t fix the problem or made it worse you can still undo that restore. Just go back to the System Restore program and click on Undo System Restore then click on next and choose the last undo under the system restore choices. This will run through the entire restore procedure again.
Having a built in System Restore feature can help keep your system running smoothly and give us peace of mind when making changes to our system.
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