Problems With Computer

Check Your System Restore Settings And

Save Storage Space On Your Hard Drive

Here’s Another Video In the

“A Clean Computer Is A Happy Computer” Series!

Today I am going to talk about a resource that most of us have but do not make the best use of.

It’s the Help & Support area built right into your Windows XP operating system.

All you have to do to access this Area is to click on the “Start Button”, then click on the menu item called “Help & Support”. It is the round blue icon with a white question mark. The icon also has a white border on the outside.

In this area there is a ton of information available, Way too much for us to cover today.

Today I will be looking at System Restore.

System Restore can track and Reverse harmful changes to your computer.

You may be surprised to hear that you are probably already using it.

I will explain here:

When you install, uninstall, update anything on your computer program, Windows usually creates a restore point.

So, for example, you want to update a video driver for your computer. A restore point is created by Window XP before you start the update.

After you finish your update you will normally need to reboot your computer to have the changes come into effect.

So if you have any problems with the new driver after rebooting, you can go to the system restore area and put your computer back to the way it was before you did the update.

Ok that sounds pretty good. And it is.

However the default Settings may be wasting allot of space – especially if you have more than one hard drive like I do.

Here are the steps to look at and change the Windows settings for this application.

Click on Start

Click on “Help and Support”

On the next page “Help and Support Center”, look for the “Pick a Task” heading.

Click on “Undo changes to your computer with System Restore”

You will now see the System Restore screen.

Click on “System Restore Settings” on the bottom left.

You will see the System Settings screen with the System Restore settings at the front of the display.

You will see an area that shows your hard drives.

Highlight drive C: and click on the Settings button, and look at what it says.

The default size settings are 12%. If you have a large hard drive you can lower to a lower number, I am using 2%.

The more space you allow the program to Use, the more restore points will be available to you if you have any problems with your computer.

When I checked my D: drive it was also set at 12%.

This drive has no operating system on it and is only for backup files.

When I moved the slider bar to the far left to the minimum setting 50Mb of storage was still being reserved for system restore points.

I did not want this so I used the option above to “Turn off System Restore on this drive”.

Doing this frees up the space on my drive for backup purposes.

I hope you will find this helpful.

All The Best!

Terry Russell
“The Computer Doctor”
A+ Service Technician
Reliant Services 1998-2010
http://www.totallyfreestuffblog.com
http://www.problemswithcomputer.com
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About the author

Terry Russell has been online since 2005 and has numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at his home page: ReliantOnlineServices.com ©1989-2010 Terry Russell & Reliant Services Chinguacousy RPO, P.O. Box 2008, Brampton, Ontario. L6Y 0L9

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