The Time Machine
Windows comes with a built-in Time Machine function. It’s called System Restore and it offers a way to roll back changes and let Windows work as it did before the change messed it up.
Many people wind up with a computer that either stops working, does strange things or begins to run really slow for no apparent reason. Some of the strange things can be:
- taking a long time to boot up
- getting a screen with your background on it but no icons or task bar
- programs failing to start or causing the machine to hang for minutes before coming onscreen.
There are other symptoms but they are usually more serious and I talked about how to fix them in earlier posts such as the Old Age series.
First you should check to see if System restore is turned on. You can find it in the Help and Support section - click [Start] then [Help and Support] You can also open Control Panel and double-click [System] then click the [System Restore] tab.
Now, how do you use it? If you download or otherwise get new software, mostly it will create a System restore point. You can also create one manually by opening System Restore and clicking [Create a Restore point]
Then go ahead and run the install – if things go wrong, you can come back to System Restore and click [Undo Changes] and then [Restore my System to an earlier time]
Note you should be careful with Restores. If you create a Restore point now, then in six weeks you decide to roll it back, you will lose all changes made since that time. Note also this shouldn’t affect documents and other data that you save to your hard disk, but you should always have critical files saved out… You do that don’t you…?
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