At times and for many reasons, you may want to disable system restore in Windows 7 systems. Windows 7 creates restore points or recovery points on a scheduled basis and when you install software or upgrades by default. You can change when and how it does this and even completely disable system restore, if you desire. I'll explain more about system restore in this post.
Just to make us as confused as possible, Microsoft refers to two different things in windows 7 systems. First, we have the System Restore and second we have System Recovery. System Recovery is best thought of as the umbrella that covers System Restore and the process used to schedule and create restore points. Technically, you use System Restore when you want to recover a restore point created by System Recovery.
When you perform a system restore, by default, several items are restored including the following:
- Windows system files
- The registry
- Applications
Always use caution when performing a restore. It is possible that the end state will be worse than the existing problem.
So, why would disabling System Restore in Windows 7 be a good thing. Well. the simple answer is that it consumes space. If it is set to use up to 10% of your drive space, on a 100 GB drive, it could be consuming 10 GB of your space. If you system is currently stable and you simply need to get some free space, disabling System Restore will delete all restore points immediately. You can then enable it again and Windows 7 will begin creating new restore points in the regular manner.
If you are an advanced user and are willing to take the risk, you can simply turn System Restore off permanently. In either case, disabling System Restore in Windows 7 is a very easy process. Simply follow these steps:
- Click Start.
- Right-click on Computer and select Properties.
- In the left pane, select System Protection.
- Click the Configure button.
- Select Turn off system protection.
- click OK.