Windows 7: Lost confidence in system restore

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and some in Windows 7.

I went to install IE9 last night. Before hand I made an image backup, restore point, and ran sfc /verifyonly to make sure all was well.



I installed IE9 and played around with it for a little bit. My overall system performance seemed lower and IE9 didn't do anything for me over Firefox or Chrome, so I decided to roll back on the install. I did this by restoring to the point before the install, which seemed to go fine. I then did an sfc /verifyonly and it found integrity violations! This is the second time this happened to me. The first was more complex circumstances so I attributed it to that. this time however was rolling back on a simple install.

Well it is good I made the image backup and that mechanism seems to work well. I have restored from the image. Ran sfc/verifyonly after the restore and it found no integrity violations.

So I guess I can't trust system restore for much of anything.
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It's hard for me to believe that simply installing IE on your system made the whole thing slower overall. I can understand not being blown away by IE and using alternative browsers that you prefer (I feel the same way). I would have probably just left IE 9 installed on the box and spent some time trying to quantify and determine what actually slowed down rather than using a system restore. I only use system restores when something has gone wrong and I am unable to fix it by hand.

Well it did, but mainly I wasn't blown away and don't need IE9.

There are a couple of optional updates that I have installed and since uninstalled, one in particular a DIRECT2D fix that slowed down my windows response (in the graphical sense, less snappy). I expect IE9 includes one or both of these and that is the root cause. But I am not about to waste my time trying to untangle it.

Regardless, my post was with reference to system restore, not IE9.