What is system restore? System Restore uses something called System Protection to create and receive restore points on a computer at regular intervals, and when you make changes to your system such as installing new software, patches, and those ever popular Microsoft updates. The regular intervals by default are at 12 a.m. every day.
How does system restore help me? It will restore your computer to an earlier time. For example let’s say that I have installed some software on my computer, and after doing such becomes unstable; maybe it’s crashing, or let’s say that I’ve gotten a virus, maybe through email or a corrupted file from a coworker, some malware, something like that. I’ve uninstalled that software, maybe have run my anti-virus software, but yet still things are unstable. I can go ahead and run that system restore, and it’ll roll back all of those system changes, like it says to an earlier time before these things started happening and my computer will be fine. It’ll be just like it was before. It’ll also go ahead and undo system changes without affecting my personal files, so I’ve created files, I’ve edited them, so when I roll back, when I do that system restore it won’t delete those… it won’t get rid of those personal files; they will still be there and be untouched.
Now let me say parenthetically that you should have an online backup service going on as well and there is no better way to get that done than by using Carbonite promo codes, since the system restore may not work.
It will also let me create restore points manually. What it won’t do though is backup my personal files. Remember we just said; that it’s not going to go ahead and affect the personal files, nor will it backed them up. You’re still responsible for backing up your own files. It will not restore deleted or damaged files. If I’ve accidentally deleted a file or has become corrupt, system restore isn’t going to help me with that. Let’s go ahead now and run a system restore. I’m going to go to my Start button and right here in my search I’m simply going to type “system restore”; and there it is under program’s. I’ll click on it and it takes me right here.
Now the first thing it does is recommend the last restore point that was created, and this happened when I went ahead and installed Microsoft Office Onenote. But what I want to do is show you a few other things, so let’s choose a different restore point. Go ahead and go here to “next”; you’ll see the restore point that I just told you about. It created it on its own when I installed Microsoft Office Onenote. This one here is a manual restore point that I created. These three restore points were created after Windows updates. This is an undo point; we’ll talk about that in just a little bit, and this is also critical update. Now we’re still going to go ahead and use this one, but I want you to see here; “scan for affected programs”, and when I clicked this it’s going to now go ahead and start to see what will happen to the different programs on my computer, if I go ahead back to that restore point, if I roll back my system changes; well right here at the top it shows programs and drivers that will be deleted, and OneNote is going to go ahead and be gone. Down here, programs and drivers that might be restored. These programs may not work correctly, and there’s none detected so that’s good.
So the only thing we’re going to have to deal with is OneNote, that’s fine; we’re going to say that we don’t want OneNote. I just want to show you there it is, right there. All right let’s close this and we’ll go to next; we’re going to choose that drive, because it’s the only one we have, and finish. Now it says once started, system restore cannot be interrupted; do you want to continue? yes I do, but look here system restore cannot be undone until after it has been completed. If System Restore is being run in safe mode or from the System Recovery Options menu it cannot be undone.
This is a new thing in Windows 7, it used to not be able to undo a system restore and now we can. I will show you that when our System Restore is done, let’s go ahead and let’s say yes, and we’re going to let this go. It’s going to take a little while, so now I’m not going to make you sit here and watch; but there will be times when I’m going to pop in because there’s a screen I want you to see and be aware of, so hang in there with me and I’ll be right back. You’ll notice now that we are logging off and shutting down in preparation for our system restore. Don’t panic, this is natural, now we’ll see this screen “please wait while your Windows files and settings are being restored. system restore is initializing…” again, all part of the procedure. Once again the computer is shutting down for the final time, it’ll restart and our system restore will be in place.
And welcome back here we are, system restore was completed successfully. Alright I’m going to go ahead and close that, and let’s take another look at system restore here. See, our first option now is “undo the system restore”. Select this option to undo the system restore done at the time listed if you think it didn’t fix problems or caused more problems. Now you’ll see that OneNote is gone, so it definitely rolled it back there. Let’s go next here, there it is, see my “undo system restore”, which would bring me back and actually it would return OneNote to the state it was in before we did our system restore. And that’s how you can return your computer to an earlier time using system restore. Thanks! I’ll see you next time.
Thanks for watching!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-pAynGUejk