Daniel, Michael,

This is where WinXP is such a joy to work with. One day I installed a version of McAfee which slowed Outlook Express to a crawl. Simple to get rid of, I called up WinXP's restore points and backed up one. It didn't affect any data (OE newsgroup files) at all, just the registry and the installed programs. It took about a minute and a reboot.

If you want to specifically create a restore point, with a description of why you're creating it, you can, otherwise they are created pretty much every day, depending on the space allocated for them.

In addition you can "forward" restore, or undo an undo. ;-)


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>2. Backup
>In my experience, most of the time when you're forced to format/reinstall a system, it's because of an install/uninstall that didn't go well. The best way to protect you from these bad surprises is to make an image of your C:\ drive before you install new software. I often make a snapshot before and after installing new software. This allows me to make a rollback if something goes wrong. This is why I split the data from the programs. If you decide to work with disk images, then the fastest way is to save the image to another partition in a first step and save the image to CDs in a second step. To create an image of my C:\ drive (4 GB) it takes about 18 minutes.