Help understanding “System Restore” in Windows XP

murphydavid

I needed to use system restore but found that due to my ignorance of not setting a system restore point (before installing some what turned out to be conflicting software) the nearest restore point was too old.
Now I’ve recovered from that I thought to make sure it does not happen again.
I looked at help and found it says under System restore overview that
“These restore points allow you to revert the system to a previous time. They are created daily and at the time of significant system events”.
Well I checked mine and they are most definitely not being created daily (more like once in 8 days) and neither are they being created before every software installation.
I want to make it create one automaticaly every day but could not find a way to do it. Does anyone know if it can be done or is it just down to remembering to set a restore point before installing software?
The help seemed to say that there is an issue with alocated memory that might stop it creating points, but in the end, as far as I can tell, memory used for the points is recycled. I.e. once the memory allocated for the points is used up then the oldest restore data is deleted and the new point data is added so I don’t need to monitor memory use. Is that correct?
Obviously I don’t actually need a restore point for every day but I would rather that than what happened to me which was I installed 3 or 4 programs in a particular week. The last one (an anti-virus clashed with my existing anti-virus that I should have uninstalled first) crashed my system and the last automatic restore point was back to over a week prior and I lost the 3 good installations and the time I spent customising them.
Also as I was trawling around the help in the hope of finding answers I came across a page entitled “To exclude a non-system drive or partition “ (I did not want to exclude anything but as I could not find a page that said “To include a non-system drive or partition” I checked it out to see if I had accidentally excluded anything).
Anyway after it says ‘Open System Properties’ which I did. The 3rd instruction said Under Drive settings, click the non-system drive or partition that you want to exclude, then click Settings. But there is no Drive settings button or tab to click? Anyone know where it is?

Thanks

Chippy_Minton

Most of the answers can be found in Frequently Asked Questions Regarding System Restore in Windows XP.

For scripts/programs to create restore points see:

http://www.dougknox.com/xp/scripts_desc/xp_sysrestorepoint.htm
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_sysrestorepoint.htm
http://windowsxp.mvps.org/createrp.htm

The Drive settings isn't a button or tab; it's in the middle of this screenshot:

murphydavid

Just want to say thanks to you Chippy_Minton thats answered it all. It was a bit naugthy of microsoft to say they are created daily when they are in fact only created after the computer has been monitored as running for 24 hours. This means I must run my computer for 24 hours in 8 days.
Thanks again