A Scary Morning

This morning, I booted up my computer as usual. As I noted in another article, I have made the switch to Windows 7 and have been pleased — until this morning’s bootup. It nearly gave me a heart attack!

First, my entire setup (customization) had disappeared and Win7 had reverted to its original settings. And in doing so, it stripped out my IE8 settings — e.g., all of my Favorites had disappeared. I feared to open Outlook and so didn’t.

Second, I thought this problem was easily resolved by a System Restore. One of the nice things about Registry Mechanic is that it creates a restore point every time it runs, and I have it set to run at bootup. But it turns out that no restore points had been saved. The reason was that when Win7 was installed, no one remembered to allocate space for the restore points. Registry Mechanic tried to make the restore points but had no space allocated for saving them.

So now I’m thinking about pulling out what little hair I have. I called my computer guy and left a message. While waiting, I decided to simply shut down and reboot on the off-chance that this would solve the problem.

To my surprise — it did! My system rebooted into the proper settings and all was well. But I am taking no more chances. I confirmed that space has been allocated for restore points (10% of the hard drives is now allocated) and I rushed out to Office Depot and bought an external 1 Terabyte Seagate drive, which is on sale this week for $90, which I immediately plugged into my computer so I could make a System Image through Win7’s Backup and Restore program. That took about 20 minutes and as I write, the Seagate drive has been attached to another of our computers and a System Image is being created for it.

So some words of caution: (1) Check to make sure your computer has sufficient space allocated to save multiple system restores. (2) Create system restore points regularly. (3) Consider doing a System Image as just-in-case insurance and do so on a regular basis.

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