For reasons that I don’t think are relevant here, I wanted to perform a ‘system restore’ on my machine. Since I hadn’t set a restore point recently, I used one of the dates “suggested” by the System Restore program itself. After running the program, I was surprised to get a message telling me that the restore failed.
I then tried performing a ‘system restore’ using five more restore dates, all of which had been created by the program, and all of which failed.
What is going on here? What can possibly be “wrong” with six apparently independent possible restore points? Can the System Restore program itself ever get corrupted? Can it fail?
Basically System Restore is garbage. So much that i have turned it off on my machine completely to save the disk space and system resources. It really never works the way it should and in my opinion it might be easier to fix the problem then to try and fix it through a system restore
What i meant to say is fix the problem from a different approach then system restore. Yes system restore files can become corrupt they may also not even fix the problem even if they worked. Not only that but they can sometimes make the problem worse, epically if you have changed a lot since the restore point. All system restore does is restore some registry vaules and some .dll and .exe files, which may or may not be good anyway.
Sorry if I seemed to be not agreeing with you or appeared to be persisting in trying to get a system restore. I agree with you - I am (trying) to fix things first by doing a thorough search and purge of malware (I’ve already caught a bunch).
Care to be a little more specific on the problem? Spyware is a good start, be sure to use at least two different programs. I am sure you already have an anti virus. I would use that, please say its not Norton. After that a good registry clean would do you good too. CCleaner works great. Is this in anyway a browser hijack? In that case take a look at hijackthis.
In general, system restore works well for very small incremental changes. In other words, scenarios like this:
Take a restore point. Install a new program. Use it for 3 days, meanwhile installing nothing else. Try to uninstall it & the uninstall fails, leaving a mess. Do a system restore. Mess eliminated.
For anything more dynamic than that, SR is useless. Or rather, it was designed for the scenario I outlined, not for undoing malware.
SR includes some checking to try to avoid making a bad situation worse. If you have done any Windows updates since the SR point, there is a high likelihood the prior SR points won’t run. That’s a Good Thing. Unfortunately, the failure messages are not very informative.
Malware will often try to corrupt either system restore itself or the system restore data files. They do that to close off one more avenue for you to get rid of it. If you normally run as admin, your malware runs as admin too & can trash those files as easily as any others.