From: rcgldr on
> After some bad computer troubles lately I was advised to daily use the tool called "System restore"

In my opinion, you'd be better off getting a second hard drive, partitioning
the second hard drive, installing another instance of the OS (or a compatable
OS) on the second hard, drive, boot into the other instance of the OS,
and then backup your primary OS partition by simply copying it to the second
drive partition.

If your primary OS is on the C: drive, there's no easy way to restore the
boot sector and boot files (NTLDR, msdos.sys, io.sys), but you can delete
all the other files and restore that way.

Better still would be to partition you primary hard drive and not install
any OS on the C: partition. Install the primary OS on the D: partition,
then backup the D: parition by copying files.

You can use windiff (do a websearch for this) to verify a backup or restore.

After a backup and verify, you can quick format the D: partition, and copy
from the backup partition to defrag or restore a corrupted OS.

The only issue I've had doing this is \windows\installer directory gets
emptied the first time you do any update. After this occurs, you can
copy from the backup parition a second time and \windows\installer will
not get emptied a second time.