Platinum Edition Using® Microsoft® Windows® XP

Using System Restore

Sometimes, installing a device driver causes such severe instability that you want to restore your system to a previously known good state. In the old days, the only way to do this was to restore your system from a backup. Today, however, Windows XP has a System Restore application that can be used to restore a previous configuration of Windows XP. When you install a new piece of hardware, Windows XP creates a restore point. You can also manually create one by following these steps:

NOTE It's worth noting that XP's System Restore does not back up documents or user files, only system files. If you want a backup utility that makes it possible to recover your work documents and files in the same way that System Restore does ...