I use a number of towers of different brands and models. Every tower I have ever used has the same issue. When I need SYSTEM RESTORE it rarely works. Currently I have 3 DELL 8100s. There are two printers installed on all 3. My primary tower has this issue, One of the printers respond normally, while the second is very slow to respond with long pauses between pages. I swapped towers to confirm this is in the tower and not the printer. It IS in the tower. When I tried SR to go back at least one month long before the issue, "INCOMPLETE", yet again. In the past I have solved many small issues by going back to an earlier point in time. Can SR be repaired? Can it be downloaded from MS or elseware? Is there a FREE third party clone that uses the same CALENDAR approach, not just SNAP SHOTS or RESTORE POINTS only starting at the time of installation? COMODOS Time Machine works that way. That program would only work if I had my tech friend reload the OS making the tower 100% functional. Then when I needed to I could restore the system to that point no matter how much time had elapsed. That would be the furthest point in the past. Do all these RESTORE programs work the same way? Ms was useless to me as usual. I would rather use SR if I could get it to work since I could go back a month into the past as opposed to reloading the OS first to get a GOOD point to go to. Too many $s for this machine. All ideas welcome.
system restore is useless when dealing with driver problems. I've encountered the same problem when I updated vga drivers that cause me problems (system restore didn't fix the problem). System Restore is not reliable and I always disable it. Comodo time machine is a much better solution but I encountered problems where it won't install on all computers. It's still a new software that needs further refinement. But when it does work on your computer it can restore your computer to the day the software was installed. It's best feature is speed, it can do a snapshot in seconds. I rely on weekly image backups to restore me to an earlier time. When you restore an image back to the same hard drive/partition this always works. An image backup is a complete backup (windows/software/drivers/programs). The only drawback is that if your c: drive is large it can take hours to backup and restore. My c: drive is small 20gb (but only 6gb of use data) it takes 5 minutes to backup/restore. To me this is the best solution and also the only way to restore your computer if you have a hard drive failure. (macrium reflect/driveimage xml/paragon drivebackup express are some free ones).
