Microsoft offers a component in its operating systems that will allow you to restore your system back to the state it was in before a malfunction or system failure. Microsoft in particular has had its problems of crashes and malfunctions. This is the reason they have built in an operation that will allow you to restore your operating system to its original state should you experience a fatal crash.

Windows systems restore was not always built into Microsoft’s programming. As their operating systems began to grow and expand they started offering a systems restore feature to make their system more attractive. Windows XP has a Windows systems restore feature built into it.

The newest kid on the block is Windows Vista. While Vista still has its share of problems, it does have an improved systems restore feature that is based on Shadow Copy technology and provides a broader spectrum of restore options. Let us say that you want to restore your computer to yesterday at 4:00 p.m. You will get a calendar that comes up on your screen asking you for a date and time to restore your computer to. Just choose that date and your system will do the rest of the work for you.

Restoring your system will not cause you to lose any data or files. It will only restore your operating system to the settings you had before changes were made. System restore will back up system files with extensions such as exe, dll, and others. It saves these files in a safe place for recovery at a later time and date. In many ways this serves as a system backup that will prevent you from losing your stored files in the event of a system crash.

The different operating systems such as Windows XP and Windows Vista have quite a few differences in the way they system restore works. Windows XP has a volume of 12% where Windows Vista works on a volume of 15%. Vista was designed with much larger volumes in mind. Windows XP had a limit on the amount of backed up files it stored but that window has been greatly expanded with Windows Vista. Vista also offers frequent updates that come across your computer as soon as they become available. It is hoped that Vista will soon have all of the kinks worked out of it and it will be a more acceptable operating system.

Up until the point of Windows XP the operating system could not be restored as long as the settings were set to boot normally or in safe mode. If Windows was not bootable it was not possible to restore the system. Windows Vista has changed this in the Windows Recovery Environment. This will allow you to launch system restore even though the Windows system is not bootable.

Microsoft has always has its share of problems and frustrated users. It seems as though you get used to one operating system and they already have another one on the market. With Windows Vista they are hoping to eliminate many of the problems they have faced in the past with respect to system crashes.