Vista - What's a good 3rd party system restore program?

Long story short, my new hp vista home premium sp1 won't revert to previous restore points. I have spend several hours reading about this problem and it appears that I can either use a third party program or restore in safe mode which only works sometimes.

Is there a good third party system restore program?

If it matters, i use windows defrag, CCleaner and my pc came with norton but I delted it upon receiving the computer.


Thanks in advance

It is a good idea to make backup images of your drive - they can be restored in a few minutes- in fact it the probably the most important thing you can do.

There is an excellent small, fast program - the free version is probably all you need.

If you only have one operating system ( sounds like you do) - you use the bootable disc the program runs off to restore the image.

Make another image every now and again so it is reasonably up to date and delete the old one.

You need to store the image somewhere that is not your operating system partition .

Make another partition for that , or use an external drive.

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download


System restore is a useful tool - it should be working.

What exactly is the problem - at what point does it fail - any error messages?

The error says: "System Restore did not complete successfully. Your computer's system files and settings were not changed."

I have never gotten it to work in 5 attempts.

I also read that anti-virus programs interfere with it so I should turn them off when creating a restore point and also when restoring.

This is my problem: I want to set restore points so I can experiment with new software programs. I don't want to go trough all the hassle of turning my anti-virus off and on, or restarting in safe mode.

It appears easier to get a third party program.

My pc is 2 weeks old and still has the factory image on the hd. I made my recovery disks and will be making backups of the entire hard drive. I made some registry backups using CCleaner.

I will look into the program you posted.

And yes, I only have vista.

I know where you are coming from . You can probably tell I experiment with apps. and o/s's a lot. I need an easy way to recover.

The Macrium program is superb.

Did you try turning system restore off all together - then turn it back on - create a restore pt. and see if that works?

I am experimenting and will try that.

Based on several hours of reading about that error message, it appears that the anti-virus is interfering, defragging is interfering or something similar.

I found a entire site about system restore from a MVP and it seems to back up what i am saying. System Restore in Windows Vista:

It says the vista restore works entierly different than the xp restore.

I'll keep trying to solve this problem, I just want an one-click way to rollback any new changes rather than to load an entire set of dvd backups.

Another dumb question...if I create a registry backup in CCleaner, it says to restore it just right click it and sleect merge. Would that work as a simple restore program?

Ccleaner creates a .reg file, I believe.

Merging that back will put those entries back in - but it won't remove any additional entries.

Might help - depends on the problem.

The only way to restore the registry properly is to back up the Hives - then restore from the command prompt in WinRe.

I should make another partition your HD and store a Macrium image on there. If you get into real trouble - boot the Macrium cd and restore the image.

On my system, I have small o/s partitions - 25 to 30gb - making the Macrium image takes 5-6 mins . Restoring takes 10 mins - no big deal.

Worth trying system restore first, before restoring an image as it is a bit quicker - if we can get it to work.

Unfortunately - you need an installation dvd to do a repair install.

Restoring the factory image should do it.

You would need to back everything up first.

If you are still having problems after restoring to factory condition - because the machine is new - you could take it back.

Thanks very much for your help

system restore needs a MINIMUM of 300mb to complete successfully. do a disk cleanup (careful not to delete restore points), uninstall any unused programs, then defrag. make sure you have the neccessary amount of free space, then try system restore again.