Uninfect Your PC with System Restore February 5, 2010
Use System Restore to ‘Uninfect’ Your Computer
Windows offers a great feature called System Restore that nearly everyone has probably needed at sometime or another but it seems few people even know about it. Before I go any further, let me say that I am of the opinion that there is no excuse for not having some sort of anti-virus and anti-spyware software running on your computer. My personal choice for my backup laptop - an XP machine - is Grisoft’s AVG package. It’s free and it works great.
With that said, there are times when you need more or something different and that’s where System Restore can come in handy. System Restore periodically saves a system restore point to provide a means of returning to a known-good configuration should something go wrong. Windows automatically creates a system restore point for you any time you install new software, a Windows update, or make any significant change to your system. You can also manually create a system restore point.
Now, suppose you get hit with some sort of malware. The most popular one today seems to be the annoying pop-up that tells you your system is infected and you should run a specific virus removal software. Don’t fall for it, it’s malware and if you let it run, you’re already infected. But if you do get infected, you can sometimes get around it without having to do a full restore to factory settings.
Here are the steps:
- Click Start / All Programs / Accessories / System Tools / System Restore
- Choose “Restore my computer to an earlier time”
- Click Next
- Using the calendar, select a day and system restore point that you want to return to (choose a date that falls BEFORE the date your computer became infected)
- Save your work and shut down any open programs.
- Click Next to confirm your wish to restore your computer to the designated system restore point
At this point your computer will shutdown, reboot, make some changes, then be magically restored to the previous date. Don’t be alarmed, it can take a few minutes. You won’t lose data files on your computer, but if you’ve installed software in between the two dates you’ll likely have to re-install those programs.
This isn’t a perfect solution and sometimes your computer can become so infected that the virus or malware won’t allow System Restore to perform properly. But in most cases this is a simple way to eradicate the problem. And if it does work don’t just relax - count yourself lucky and get anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed on your computer immediately.
