Windows 7: Restore Point 101?

I swear that in XP, and maybe in some Windows 7 instances I've seen, restore points are created every day.



But in my versions of Windows 7, the only automatic restore points are at times of Critical Updates.

Is this configurable? I'd like to have a restore point created at least a couple times a week.

You can manually create restore points whenever you want:

Create a restore point

And a tutorial by Brink...

System Restore Point - Create

Restore points in Windows 7 are created automatically if no other restore points (manual, update,etc) have been created for 7 days.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...(v=vs.85).aspx

I have my Outlook set to remind me to create a restore point every Wednesday. You can make it ever how often you want.

This is how you can schedule restore points:

Click "Start," type "Task Scheduler" into the search box at the bottom of the Start menu and press "Enter."

Navigate to the "Task Scheduler Library\Microsoft\Windows\SystemRestore" folder in the left pane of the Task Scheduler window.

Right-click the "SR" event in the top middle pane of the Task Scheduler window, and click "Properties."

Click the "Triggers" tab at the top of the SR Properties window.

Click the "New" button at the bottom of the Triggers pane.

Click "One Time," "Daily," "Weekly" or "Monthly" under "Settings" in the New Trigger window.

Type a start time in the box to the right of "Start" at the top of the New Trigger window.

Configure the recurrence, week and month settings under the "Start" box. Different settings appear depending on the time period you selected.

Click "OK" twice.

Source: http://www.ehow.com/how_8211861_sche...windows-7.html

Thanks to everyone who has responded here, and I appreciate whs's tutorial on scheduling the restore points.

I guess I should divulge "the rest of the story" here, because maybe it is material.

This was on my daughter's VAIO laptop, which, in early December, and then yesterday, was clearly showing signs of malware infestation. Her Firefox would not launch or run properly (oddly, my account, an administrator one, like hers, on the laptop, seemed to browse fine).

Because I was tired and lazy (a bad combo to have while working on a technical problem), I opted to "blast the problem away" by using SR. I had already tried booting into safe mode and looking around for signs of an infection, and that cured nothing.

I was hoping for a restore point in the past 72 hours, since the problem had only begun last night. But my only choices were 12/25 (upon installation of AVG 2012, an upgrade from AVG 2011), and 12/11, and I forget what the 12/11 trigger had been. So 16 days had passed since the last restore.

Once I system-restored, I had to reinstall AVG 2012 and Firefox, which had been updated between 12/25 (the restore point I used) and yesterday. But everything now appears to be running fine.

So first, any theory about why I'd only have 12/25 and 12/11 restore points, and none since? My daughter is not someone who plays around with settings like how often a restore point is created?

Second, short of using the scheduler, is there a way of checking to see if the restore points are going to be created every seven days again?

Finally, and this isn't a topic for this subforum, but I assume that a good Safe Mode scan with Malwarebytes or Super Antispyware is in order?

1. AVG is a really bad choice for an AV program. I would highly recommend to use something else> I myself use Norton (NIS2012) which I think is the best. But that costs money and may not be in your budget.

2. You can check the restore points. Open an elevated Command Promt and run this command: vssadmin list shadows - that will list all restore points by date and time.

3. As to the specifications, you should have at least one restore point per week. Why this was not the case is anybodys guess.