If there is one piece of advise that you see on a lot of Windows tweaking site that I vehemently disagree with it would have to be disabling System Restore. Granted back in the heyday of XP it may not have been the best of ways to cover your ass when it comes to screwing up your system but we’ve grown past XP and following this suggestion is just stupid.

Part of the argument is that disabling it is a space saver – sorry but when you can buy a 1 Terabyte drive for around the $100 mark I don’t think space is much of a problem. Other than that I have never heard of an excuse for not using System Restore that makes any sense.

This whole thing was re-enforced for me tonight when I went to upgrade a set of drivers for my RealTek audio. In what has become a normal habit now I created a restore point before installing the new drivers and thank the binary gods that I did.

The install went fine but the first clue that something was wrong was when I tried load the new RealTek High Definition Audio driver that they said would work on Windows 7. To put it simply the change in drivers was a no-go with a nice warning dialog popping up to tell me to forget it.

So I used the Update option to get the standard RealTek audio drivers from Windows Update and they installed with no problem and I had my sound back – along with another really nasty problem. After I rebooted and started to launch my normal starting programs I noticed that everything was either severely lagging or was just non-responsive.

Firing up Task Manager I had a look at was running and discovered that the services.exe module was just hammering my memory and to a lesser degree. When I say hammering I mean it was literally knocking the shit out of it as I watched it keep climbing to north of 200,000K with no slowdown in sight.

I figured okay let’s try another reboot just incase something got a little barfed between changing drivers. Once back in I launched Task Manager right off the top and sat there watching as services.exe decided that my system memory was an all you can eat buffet. As I tried to get my pulse back under control from the thought of having to a re-install or repair I tried to think what my other options were.

The other option turned out to be quite simple – use System Restore to go back top before I installed the new RealTek drivers – which I did. Simple solution and within five minutes I had my well-behaved machine back.

The short of this is that System Restore is an ass saver and worth whatever space it might use creating those restore points. Sure you might have to go in once in a while and clear out some of the older restore points but the peace of mind that System Restore offers is worth it.

So here’s my number one tip – Enable System Restore and use it. As for those that would tell you to disable tell them to piss off because it’s lousy advice. You’ll thank me the next time it saves your ass.