Saving a System Restore (Home Premium)

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I’v just bought and configured a new PC for my Dad who is now 88. This came with Vista Home Premium. The latest Patch Tuesday has caused a problem however and the machine has crashed at a “Waiting for stage 3 of 3” screen. Searching the web seems to indicate a prob with one of the recent Media Centre Patches.

I now live 200 miles away from my father and tried initially to talk him round a repair, but thios also does not work as every time he gets as far as trying to select a resore point it tells him System Restore is already running. So I now need to drive up there and correct things.

I bought him a new HP machine which comes with so-called “Recovery Disk system” which of course will not repair a broken system. I have burned a Recovery disk though and will take that with me.

All of this set me thinking about System Restore however. As I personalised everything eg shortcuts, favorites, Updates, email, software adware virus protection etc etc there is surely a need to be able to save a “Main” system restore rather than simply seeing it wiped as the disk fills up and deletes earliest first.

I know I can use a disc imager, but this is beyond the limits of users like my father. System Restore is relatively easy to use however, and could make a nice easy back-up utility to restore the system to its factory state PLUS basic personalisation. This can never replace a Back-up plan, but it would be an easy way to get basic cover.

Anyone got any thoughts on this?

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You might like to plough through this Microsoft article which explains why System Restore means, to a significant extent, Operating System Restore.

If/when you get your Dad’s PC working, then you might consider something like CrossLoop for remote accessing of his PC (just click on the Download button at the middle left). Might save a few of those 400-mile round trips?

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Thanks for the link. I did read it it, and yes I understand that it is meant as an operating system back-up.

However for many “non-techie” users like my father, once their system is set up, they will make next to no system changes over a period of a couple of years (updates, virus sigs etc excepted).

So a simple to used saved System Restore could have a place for this type of user.

II’ve also had a look at the CrossLoop site, and I may have a play at that. I have used Microsoft Remote Computing before, but it is not particularly user friendly.

Colin

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You ought to check out Free Secure Online Storage—Xdrive, VMN Storage – Free Online Storage, & backup.com – When Losing Data is Not An Option. Xdrive provides 5GB with an paid upgrade. VMN provides 1GB with a paid upgrade. backup.com is strictly a pay service. You can find other services at Live Search: free online storage.

Joe

--Joe

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My own ISP in the UK (BT) also give a free 1BG store. But I have data backed up automatically via batch files to a different partition which for the level of data my dad has is sufficient

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HP tech support will help, and your Dad might give them a call. They can walk him through it over the phone. Unfortunately HP ships with almost no ‘dead wood’ documentation, so that if you have a total crash it helps to have printed out at least some such material to have it available.

On my HP the recovery system (to restore it to its original condition) was on a separate partition on the hard drive, and the disks are just a copy of that for a total disaster or a new hard drive. If you ever want to restore the computer to its original state then you can normally do it with nothing but the computer itself (for which you also need documentation). None of us wants to do that if we have invested heavily in setting the thing up, so backup software is a wise investment.

The System Restore link given in the thread was for XP, but your Dad has Vista. I suggest you click Help And Support on the Start menu on any Vista computer for an excellent Q & A that is applicable to Vista. From the sound of it he should have a restore point prior to Patch Tuesday on his computer, and that is what I think he should use.

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The following brief and condensed quote is from the PAID VERSION of Windows Secrets Newsletter, and there are further details given there. The ‘paid’ part of the newsletter is a voluntary sum of your choice. You might like to subscribe to the free version first to see what that is like (it is a useful source): Windows Secrets. By now there is plenty of other documentation available, and I hope the source will consider this to be fair use as well as a plug for their newsletter. Susan Bradley is the author of the article.

one patch this month suffers from a “configuring updates” disease. This causes some systems that installed the patch to get stuck in a loop, saying “Configuring Updates Stage 3 of 3 — 0%,” and a few seconds later rebooting. This behavior repeats over and over. Microsoft product manager Nick White announced in the Windows Vista blog on Feb. 19 that patch 937287 was being pulled from distribution due to the issues it was causing.

That sounds like your description, and if you do a web search on that patch number you may get a lot of hits now that everyone is talking about it. If you can restore the computer to the pre-patch state, I would re-install every patch except that.

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