My parents have a bad habit of using System Restore every time their limited memory cache fills up and their browser starts slowing down. I’ve tried explaining to them that there are other options, but they seem to feel that it’s been working so far with no problems, so why mess with a good thing?
It seems to me that using System Restore on a daily basis could eventually lead to damage to the hard drive if nothing else, but I don’t have any concrete facts to present them with. Is this a problem at all, or am I just worrying unnecessarily?
They are adding a bit of extra wear and tear on the hard drive, but as long as the drives are adequately cooled (which in many cases is not true) then they are probably not doing much harm in the long run.
A lot of adware and similar crap will automatically be killed off by what they are doing, so there’s a benefit to it as well.
Daily is probably a bit too often, but weekly wouldn’t be any cause for alarm.
My main concern was that I noticed some files and programs that had been added since the last restore were being preserved. If this is the case isn’t there a possibility that these new files were written to a spot on the hard drive that held a previous file, one that might be restored by the system operation? I ask because the hard drive was defragmented here in the last couple of days, but I’m not sure whether a restore point was placed after that or the hard drive is being restored to pre-defrag status. I do know a System Restore was done within 24 hours of the defragging.
Also, a second question: is there any reason other than a dearth of disc cache why one would have a PC become sluggish less than 24 hours after the last restore, and yet doing another system restore solves the problem? My parents know to reboot if things start bogging down, but that would be the only thing they try before doing the restore.
Nonsense. The disk activity created by a system restore isn’t any harder on the disk than any other activity. You might as well say, “Don’t write to the hard drive because that will wear it out.” Might as well keep the computer turned off.
But a restore is overkill if all you want to do is clear the cache. How about selecting “clear cache” with a few mouse clicks instead? How about increasing the cache size? Virtual memory size? Defragging? Running Ad-Aware or SpyBot to look for malware? Turning off the junk in the startup group? Adding some RAM? Removing programs not used?
If the problem is solved by any one of these, they won’t be as likely to try a daily restore.
System restore seems a little drastic an action when all you want to do is clear the browser cache - it’s a bit like moving house just because you ran out of toilet paper; I’d recommend against it simply because it is quite a serious thing to play around with.
Double-click on ‘My Computer’, then right-click the main hard drive, select properties and click the Disk Cleanup button, or (usually) Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Cleanup.
Much easier, a bit safer and doesn’t require a restart.
Anecdotally, I managed to get a BSOD halfway through a system restore which managed to hosed the data on my HD so be aware that when you do a Sys Restore, theres a slight chance of very bad stuff happening.