The First Order of Business…..
…. is to make a restore point of your system.
Or the title should be rephrased as "The First Order of Business for Sane PC Users…."
Wha—? What’s a restore point?!! (pauses for a bit) 0_0 GOODGODSOFALLTHECELESTIALPLANESOFTHEMULTIVERSEWHORAINDOWNCLEANSINGFIREONNON-TWEAKERSYOUDON’TKNOW
WHATARESTOREPOINTIS?
What if your younger brother or sister installs something and it messes up your PC?
What if you install something and you find out your PC now takes half of a queen termite’s lifespan to boot?
What if, if either of the above happened and you tried uninstalling the offending "something"s and find out it doesn’t fix the predicament you are in by even an iota?
No fallback point? You are screwed. Or maybe not screwed but doomed to spend the rest of your PC-using life grumbling about the good ol’days when your PC wasn’t acting like C-3PO before he… oh wait. There’s always a reinstall — and C-3PO was screwed up to begin with. (Anakin wasn’t good at design actually; remember what happened when Darth Sidius made him commander of his armada? Good gods! Were you able to take even a small look at what happened to the control panels of the Star Destroyers? Piccard, if he watched that last SW film, would have thanked all his lucky stars for the Okudagram…)
Anyway.
Anyway, a restore point is a fallbackpoint. You make that point, do something, and then if all hell breaks loose, you can uninstall whatever it was you installed, load that restorepoint and *poof!* like nothing happened.
If you still don’t get it, click here.
Lol! Of course you get it! But to get back on track, this is what I use for making those restore points:
Windows XP comes with a tool that makes a backup but I hear from reliable sources from all over the ‘net that this is better.
You see if you install something, it writes entries into your system’s registry. Oftentimes though, when you unistall a program, it leaves those entries in your registy, so part of your system’s configuration information remain the same even though the offending software no longer resides in your hard drive. Needless to say undesired PC behavior may still occur even after you uninstall that software.
So what to do? When you install a suspicious/unsupported software do:
1. this procedure.
2. Install the software, if you like it/doesn’t do anything amiss, fine. But if anything goes haywire, do:
3. Uninstall the software and load up the restore point by going to C:\WINDOWS\ERDNT\xxx [where xxx is the filename you set for the restore point (the default is the date you made it on)] and double-clicking on it.
And VOILA! Instant time warp!
TAKE NOTE THAT IT WILL OF COURSE LOAD UP REGISTRY SETTINGS prior TO WHATEVER YOU INSTALLED after YOU MADE THE RESTORE POINT! So if you intalled two software packages and don’t like them, it’s fine but if you’d like to keep one and do away with the other, loading up that restore point BEFORE you installed those two won’t be such a good idea. I do not know what will happen as I have never done such idiocy before. =)) That is why I make a restore point before I install something suspicious/unsupported, test it, and then make ANOTHER restore point before I attempt to install another unsupported program.
Well, that’s it for this week, I hope you learned something new. And oh, don’t forget to delete very dated restore points; they take up about 30Mb each so 6 of those will consume more than 180mb of your hdd space. Again they will be stored in the C:\WINDOWS\ERDNT folder. I normally keep two of them at each time just to be safe, but this is a matter of personal preference.
