Restoring your Computer to Working Great again

With all the different types of software and downloads from the Internet, you may have experienced your computer crashing or slowing. If you use talking software you may notice compatibility issues after you downloaded a particular program.

Here is a quick easy fix. Every PC offers a restore of your system. If you are on Windows 7, you can just hit the start key and type restore and down arrow to restore your computer to an earlier time. When the dialog box comes up, look back at all the dates and make note of when your computer worked well and restore it to that date. When my talking software stops working well, I can see a particular type of update was made on my computer and now I know which update knocked my talking software out.... I then go and hide that update in my update folder so it will never occur again. You can do the exact same thing in XP but you will have to go into the control panel to do so.

You can also set restore points. Last week, one of my students went on vacation and her laptop had been having major issues, so I took it for the week to overhaul. After I fixed it, I set a restore point with an original name, so as problems occur down the road, I can talk them through how to easily restore her computer back to the date last week. It is like getting a brand new computer right out of the box, but just loaded with all the blind software and ready to use.

Restore is a wonderful feature However: If you set a restore point on your computer on Oct 1 and you loaded another program on Nov 1, found issues on Nov 5 and restored back to Oct 1, any program you loaded after that Oct 1 date will be gone. Your files are still there, it just takes away programs---but the new added program could be what was giving you problems, so this is decision time, if you do a restore. It is something major you are doing to your machine.

Always backup your files before doing something like this. Backup, just means, make another copy somewhere else, like on a thumb drive. You should be doing this anyway because technology crashes and you always want another copy of your files somewhere else.

There are a lot of great powerful features on computers, just learn how to take control of them and use the power to your advantage, instead of them taking control of you.