Rocco,

 

Thanks for the advice. 

Personally I do not and have not used System Restore or Hibernation since the days of ME. During installation I turn this feature off and never turn it back on again. SR rarely ever works, even in Vista, and usually will cripple the Restored system in one manner or another. Although improvements have been made for Vista, SR is still a big Virus Catcher.  Some Viruses thrive on the fact that Virus scanners can not look into the SR file, which helps to spread a Virus and other Malware over and over again, without the users knowledge.  I do not recommend this action for those who do not have an alternative backup solution.

 

Instead of System Restore I rely completely on Partition cloning software. I use Norton Ghost 2003 for DOS, and did use Acronis True Image, until I installed Vista. TI is a Linux based prog ported to Windows, and unfortunately no longer works with Vista for various reasons.

 

For those interested, I run a Full System virus scan, clean my drive of garbage files, checksum with Vista and defrag with PerfectDisk 8 each week, which takes about 30 minutes. Drop into DOS, with my DOS CD, which contains Norton Ghost 2003, and create a complete clone of the Main Partition, storing it to another partition. That takes about 5 minutes for every 5 gigs of data on the drive. Once a month I copy one of those partition clones to a DVD, just incase. When my drive is attacked with a Virus or any other difficulty, it takes about 10 minutes to restore from a partition clone. I typically keep my important files on another partition or DVDs, so reinstalling does not affect the current contents.

 

I have used this method since the days of ME, because System Restore destroyed several thousands of dollars worth of work on my drive afterit could not restore the Registry correctly.

 

Hope that helps.

jankeen.com