IT Professionals

System Recovery Options In Vista Part II

Posted by on Oct 6, 2008 | One Comment

In the previous installment of this article, you learned about the different system recovery options available in Vista. We also took a closer look at one of the options — the Startup Repair option. Now, in part II, we will look at the remaining recovery options and what each is designed for.

System Restore

Installing drivers or programs that disagree with your computer does not necessarily need to result in a complete rebuild of your operating system — not when you have access to Vista’s System Restore.

Many of us have at one point or another installed a program or made some change that was harmful to our computer. For example, problems can occur when you are installing drivers for network devices (and other hardware). Vista’s System Restore makes it easy to recover from system problems that occur after installing new software.

The System Restore option helps you restore your computer’s system files to an earlier point in time. It provides a way to undo system changes to your computer without affecting your personal files, such as e-mail, documents, or photos.

Windows Complete PC Backup and Restore

Although backing up your files is important — a backup of your files cannot be used to restore your computer in the event of failure. The Windows Complete PC Backup, on the other hand, makes a backup image of your entire computer. In the event of something such as hard drive failure, you can use the image backup to restore your computer. The image created includes applications, system settings, files as well as a backup of your boot volume and system volume. With the backup image in hand, you can use the Windows Complete PC Restore option to repair your computer.

Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool

Memory problems are often the most difficult to identify and troubleshoot. Memory problems can appear to be software or operating system problems and you can spend hours of your time trying to diagnose the true problem.

Memory Diagnostics in Vista works with Microsoft Online Crash Analysis to detect crashes that might be caused by failing memory. The tool prompts you to schedule a memory test the next time you restart the computer and then scans your computer’s memory for errors.

Command Prompt

Finally, more advanced users may go straight to the Command Prompt to perform recovery-related tasks and run other command line tools for diagnosing and troubleshooting problems. The Command Prompt in Vista replaces the Recovery Console from earlier versions of Windows, such as Windows XP.

  • Ken McAvoy

    Vista is totally devoid of an option that functions EXACTLY like Windows XP’s repair/restore choice activated by putting in a full system CD and booting to that CD. This option has saved my butt on numerous occasions where virus , user file deletions etc have rendered the OS un bootable. When I patched my test version of VISTA with SP1 it just hung I think because of some sort of video driver issue BUT the point was I could not go forward or back. Trying to boot to my VISTA Ultimate CD proved futile – the only repair choice it offered did NOTHING to repair or restore the OS to bootable functionality. ON that score alone I wiped ANY further consideration of VISTA – hecks who wants to shell out big dollars for ANY OS if you cannot do a repair/restore . Although the XP choice is underdone at least it works 99% of the time. Microsoft continues to do the dumb things perfectly. As a further example of their inane stupidity they insist on treating us all like pirates by making it impossible to replace a motherboard , ram , video card or hard disk without wiping the disk and fully rebuilding the OS. Do they think this is all we want to do for heavens sake. I don’t really care about the undesirable aspects of patching or rebuilding OS – the reality is all of us are time deprived , cash strapped and have no time or money to be re-learning cloud cuckoo IT systems. Once you train a generation of people to drive a car (read Windows XP) its unrealistic to then say now you need to change to flying jumbo jets (read VISTA that cannot get off the ground) overnight – this is just stuff and nonsense and really ticks people off who otherwise once were big MS supporters. Dumb , Dumb and dumber Microsoft !!! Get a grip on reality Mr Ballmer .. marketing only works for new products , once maturity has been reached a whole lot more like benefits and substance and speed and decent recovery tools need to be in place. You just chucked out the goose and the golden eggs. And to close how stupid does Microsoft now look having to effectively suck eggs and admit that VISTA is not the shining light they spent the last 18 months trying to con the IT community into thinking it was. Hope you learned a valuable lesson Microsoft .. we are not as stupid or as silly as you think – Windows 7 had better give us what we want or you will make even bigger losses on that and only entrench Windows XP for a longer duration.

    In fact the VISTA and Windows 7 modeling I have so far seen almost guarantees XP will be around , alive and in use for much , much longer than Microsoft could ever had imagined.

    Ken
    IT Director
    Melbourne