Recover from a crash with XP's System Restore

Your computer just crashed when you downloaded and installed the latest video card driver for your system. 

If you have Windows XP, don’t sweat it. XP has a great new feature called System Restore that allows you to restore XP systems to a previous state without losing the following files:

E-mail
Favorites
My Documents
Cookies

It does this by monitoring changes to your files and folders and taking a snapshot of your system at regular intervals. If a problem with your system is encountered, you can restore the system to a previous point and roll back your system files and registry to a point when the operating system was working. Let's look at how to configure your System Restore options and how to put the feature to work.

Understanding how System Restore works
System Restore runs in the background as a service, constantly logging changes to your system in  C:\Windows\System32\Restore. In addition to this logging, System Restore also takes regular snapshots of your system state, which includes User Accounts and System Settings. 

For example, let's say you recently installed a new device driver, and a warning message is displayed that tells you this driver is not supported by XP or is unsigned. You continue with the installation anyway. As soon as you choose to continue, the System Restore feature creates a restore point automatically so that  you can restore the system if it crashes when you reboot. Restore points are also created when you install or upgrade to Windows XP or when you install any update patches from the Windows Update Web site.

By default, System Restore will create a restore point every 24 hours. If a machine is left on all the time, you can count on this happening once every 24 hours. If you shut down the machine and restart it, a restore point is created at boot-up, as long as one has not been created in the last 24 hours.

Manual restore points
Any time you think it is necessary, you can create a manual restore point. You must have administrative access to do this. Just follow these steps:

Open Help And Support from the Start menu.
Select Undo Changes To Your Computer With System Restore to bring up the Welcome To The System Restore window.

Choose the Create A Restore Point option and click Next.

Enter a Restore Point Description and click Create.

Click Home.

Restoring your computer
In the event of a crash or any other incident that leaves your computer in a non-bootable or problematic state, you can quickly restore your computer by performing the following steps:

Open Help And Support from the Start menu.
Select Restore My Computer To An Earlier Time and click Next.
Select a restore point by highlighting a day in the calendar and choosing the appropriate checkpoint.
Click Next.

Review your selected restore point and click Next. This will shut down your computer and restore your system to the specified point in time.

Note that you can undo your latest restore by following the same procedure and selecting Undo My Last Restoration.

Summary
As you can see, the System Restore feature is a powerful tool that will help you recover from problematic drivers and rogue application issues far more easily than you could with previous versions of Windows.