Monday, April 13, 2015

Set Up System Restore

When your computer starts malfunctioning, the Windows System Restore feature is a great help.  System Restore takes snapshots of your critical Windows files and saves them to restore Windows back to a working state.  If your computer suddenly starts crashing or running slow, it can usually be reversed by restoring it back to a restore point from before the problem started.

However, you will not be able to use System Restore if your computer is not set up to keep creating restore points.  To see how often your system is set to create a restore point, you will need to visit the Task Scheduler.  Simply enter "Task Scheduler" in the search box on the start menu (charms bar in Windows 8/8.1).  In the left pane, navigate to Task Scheduler Library/Microsoft/Windows/SystemRestore.  Click on the tab "Triggers" to see how often your system is set to make a restore point.

If you have no triggers or you want to change the frequency, double-click on the "SR" line in the top pane.  Then, you can click on the "Triggers" tab in the new window and edit any existing triggers or create a new one.

After you have set up automatic system restore points, you want to make sure that they are actually being made.  To do this, hit Windows Key + Pause to bring up the System window, and select "System protection" on the left side.  Click on the "System Restore" button about half-way down, and then click on Next to reach the list of restore points.  Windows will create restore points for a variety of reason; you want to find the ones that say "Automatic restore point".  They should appear to be occurring at about the frequency you specified.

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