For you Windows users, System Restore has been an Ace in the hole for twenty years.  Whenever your computer did something weird, you could usually get back to normal by using System Restore to roll back the clock to yesterday or last week when everything was working better.  On Macs they actually call it Time Machine, which just proves Apple is cooler than Microsoft.  Same feature basically.

Microsoft decided with Windows 10 that it was SO stable that System Restore wasn’t needed as much.  After all, it does take up room on the hard drive to take snapshots of your OS at various times.  It’s not like you have 300 Gigabytes of free space just lying around doing nothing.  (Oh, wait – you probably do.)

Did you know you can turn on System Restore in the unlikely event that something goes wrong with a Windows 10 update?  Then you would be able to restore it back to a few days ago or last week, just like you used to.  This might take up 20 Gigabytes of your hard drive over time, but if you are like most people, you have the room.  What you don’t have is the time to rebuild your system from scratch.

Here are the steps for turning System Restore on yourself.  If you don’t want the details, call us now at 775-276-5544 and we can do this for you.  Not everyone wants to wear the propeller hats.  We are happy to help you out.

  1. At the Start button in the search bar, type Control Panel, then click on it when it comes up.
  2. In Control Panel, change to View By either large or small icons to make it easier to see your choices.
  3. Find and click on System.
  4. In System Properties go to the System Protection tab. Click on Configure first.
  5. Verify that the radial is on “Turn on system protection”. If not, change it. Click on the Max Usage slider and make sure you have 10 to 15% of your available hard drive for system restore.  Click “OK” after you have adjusted it.
  6. It should now show “On” next to the Local Disk C: (System). This is the important drive for system restore.   Click the Create button to make a restore point now.
  7. Type “Everything Works” in the box and click the Create button. Within a minute you will have created a system restore point of your Operating System.   You are done.

Whenever Windows 10 does a update it should create a restore point before the updates are installed.  Periodically check your system restore settings (steps 1-5 above) to make sure Windows 10 updates haven’t turned it off again.  That can happen also.  If it does, just turn it back on.

This is your ounce of prevention to prevent a pound of cure.  We hope it helps someone avoid problems down the road.