Differences between Vista and 7's System Restore

HughShaw · 05 Dec 2009

I'm not sure why this is, but whenever I did a system restore with Vista SP2, it put my computer (and files!) exactly the way it way at the stated date and event of the restore point. It would even say that files were left untouched, yet newly downloaded files after said event were always gone.

Windows 7 System Restore is different in my experience. It leaves the files exactly as they were and only restores the system. This is less useful for me as recently installed programs have all the files still there, yet don't show up in the add/remove programs list. I have to manually clean things up.

So is there any way to get Win7 system restore to behave the same as it did (for me) in Vista?

Jacee · 05 Dec 2009

Have you tried making your own restore points?
You can remove programs from "Programs and Features first, then delete the files and folders.
Empty *all* temporary files and defrag after doing so.

HughShaw · 05 Dec 2009

No, it always just let Windows make the restore points automatically.

richc46 · 05 Dec 2009

When I used Vista, and used sytem restore, it did not touch my files. They remained the way they were when I decided to restore the system.

If I understand you correctly you could use system image, it puts everything back the way it was on the date of your restore point. I think this is better than what you want. If you run into a problem, but do not want to change personal documents, use System
Restore. If you want to change everything use system image.

But, onece again, when I had vista it did not perform, for me, the way that you suggest.

Have a nice weekend.

Richard

HughShaw · 05 Dec 2009

I swear that system restore restored everything back to the way it was in my Vista system. Files were previous versions, newer downloaded stuff disappeared, etc. Very strange.

That's why I wanted to ask if it was just me that experienced this...