is it worth creating a restore point? for safety

Use a good A/V. I suggest Microsoft Security Essentials in conjunction with Malwarebytes.

System restore points should be made at least once a week. You will have a problem one day (we all do) and you will be glad that you have the restore points. You can set them to be made automatically via task scheduler.

I'd say it was a good idea to make them, the system usually makes them when doing updates but it is also good practise to make manual restore points when you are installing something yourself, at least if something goes wrong you can get back to a working machine before you did the install or whatever.

I think what you are thinking in regards virus retention is yes if you get one it will be in a restore point but it can't do any harm there, unless of course you restore to the point the virus is in.

It was usually advised that if you became infected the idea was to clean the machine then when it was clean clear out all points and make a new one on a clean machine.

The idea being that if during trying to clean up the machine you screwed up at least you could get the machine working, even if it still contained the virus, then start again with the cleaning process.:)

Hope that ramble made sense

bobright said:

i remember back then it wouldnt be good to keep restore points as it could make viruses linger, or just was not reliable

is that still the case? or is it worth making restore points?

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I have System Protection enabled and I will make restore points manually before doing driver updates, etc. which can cause problems. Overall though I haven't found it especially useful. What I do find really useful is disk imaging. Having a recent image to restore when the system becomes unbootable has saved me a lot of grief on occasion. Creating and restoring disk images is actually quite easy and there are free programs that work very well.