Win7 Can Delete All System Restore Points On Reboot 449
An anonymous reader writes "Astonishingly, the so-called system restore feature in Windows 7 deletes restore points without warning when the system is rebooted. This forum thread on answers.microsoft.com shows some of the users who have experienced the problem. Today I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit (no dual boot), and noticed that whenever the machine rebooted after installing an application or driver, the disk churned for several minutes on the 'starting Windows' screen. Turns out that churning was the sound of my diligently created system restore points being deleted. Unfortunately I only found this out when Windows barfed at a USB dongle and I wanted to restore the system to an earlier state. This is an extraordinarily bad bug, which I suspect most Windows 7 users won't realise is affecting them until it's too late."
In Soviet Microsoft (Score:2, Funny)
system reboots you!
Not That It Matters Much... (Score:5, Informative)
I have disabled System Restore now, and I never ever suggest using it to anyone I know.
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The only time I used system restore is when I couldn't reboot with new installed components or service packs so maybe MS decided that if you rebooted successfully, then you do not need the restore data anymore, hehe... ;-))
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Take a look at fsarchiver. All the benefits of a dd image, with many advantages.
It only clones blocks that in use, it compressed the image, and it can restore to a different sized partition.
System restore stinks. Image your disk (Score:5, Insightful)
System restore has always been awful. It doesn't play well with anti-virus, it's slow, it's always been buggy. Worst part is I've only had it work to fix a problem for me ONCE in the couple of years I bothered with it. These days if I want to save the state of a computer that is working well I simply image the disk. More expensive and potentially time consuming but a hell of a lot more reliable.
Oh and don't image it with Windows 7 Microsoft tools. I had an issue with Vista's system restore tool once that had me scrambling for a copy of Virtual PC to read the images. (Vista system restore would just wipe the existing partitions then fail with an error before restoring a thing).
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What parent says. I've tried system restore most often on machines that were infected. System restore points always seem to be infected - it's like an infection automatically makes Windows discard old restore points, and create new infected restore points. The best strategy is to back up the system after a fresh install, and every time something major or something important is installed. Of course, the VERY best strategy is an enterprise solution, where the system is backed up regularly - like each Frid
Stop preaching Linux (Score:3, Insightful)
But ... many are still using windows and praying to their $invisible_man_in_the_sky. The future is here, but half of you didn't get the memo.
Please stop preaching Linux like a religion.
The fact is I can get a lot of software on Windows that is unmatched on Linux. When I want to run Linux software, I can usually get a version that works on Windows, but if I can't I run Linux (either on a VM or on physical hardware).
Oh and by the way I have a degree in Astronomy. In this area there's a lot very good Windows only software, and a lot of very good Linux only software. I'm not about to shut myself out of using any of it.
Re:Stop preaching Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, it's great, which is why I run Windows in a VM on Linux. I keep a snapshot of a working XP virtual disk handy.
Why? I'm the go-to geek in the family and I've had to call Microsoft registration many times to reactivate XP after an upgrade or salvaging a drive from a dead MB. They're always polite and friendly, and reading the seven sets of six digits over the phone and typing in the response only takes about 10-15 minutes. But...
What about when that 800 number goes dead? Or they stop giving out activations for older XP systems? Or they finally say "sir, that's an OEM license and only valid for the broken machine, not the new MB."
Ironically, what I need the Windows VM for the most is iTunes. Thanks, Apple!
Linux issues can be fixed.
Windows can be reinstalled. Probably. Or you can buy a new version and migrate your data. Perhaps.
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Inexperienced Linux user:
Windows issues can be fixed.
Linux can be reinstalled. Probably. Or you can get a new distro and migrate your data. Perhaps.
Do you see the point I'm trying to hammer home?
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Re:Stop preaching Linux (Score:5, Informative)
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Please stop preaching Linux like a religion.
You sinner!!! I hope that when you are done in Earth you get a Job(s) as the doorman in hell's Gates!
(All right, all right, this one was awful!)
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My man,
the beauty of windows isn't windows.
it's active directory and all the other systems that ms puts together for fleet management.
i'll slap the shit out of the next person who says openldap. it is pretty easy to do stuff like point an entire OU to a WSUS server and specify how updates are done.
they've built an impressive system for enterprise setups that would take a shitload of work in linux. pushing down group policies to a fleet of macs?
Re:System restore stinks. Image your disk (Score:5, Informative)
It is easier to push updates to Linux boxes, except those updates aren't just a small smattering of MS updates, but rather for every application installed on the box.
There are some nice virtues to Microsoft's myriad of enterprise tools. But suggesting that Windows boxes are easier to manage for software updates is not one of them.
Then again, one can also argue that instead of fucking with group policy and MS exploit patches, you could just run Linux and run secure boxes that are far easier to secure in the first place.
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Security policy is just one aspect of Group Policy, and a small one at that relative to the total set of configurable options. In essence, if it is a configurable Windows setting, Group Policy can configure it; including settings that have no GUI front-end outside of the GPO configuration window (ie. typically registry settings without a Control Panel UI). The point being, of all the configurable settings in Windows (or any OS), security settings tend to be a minority considering everything else.
That aside,
Re:System restore stinks. Image your disk (Score:5, Insightful)
i'll freely admit that AD beats anything Linux has to offer in a number of ways, but for patch/package management, RHEL's tools blow WSUS out of the water. WSUS is misery to administer, and offers no way to legitimately push updates, only to make them available the next time the server tries to update. It also forces you to do everything by group, no one off specific updates to a particular server, which is a minor thing, except for when you need it.
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pushing down group policies to a fleet of macs?
Workgroup Manager [wikipedia.org]. Between that and Apple Remote Desktop [apple.com] there's practically nothing you can't manage on a fleet of Macs that authenticate against OD on an OS X Server. Software updates, backups of workstations, printers, etc...
Of course, if you have your little heart absolutely set on managing Macs with actual Microsoft group policy on a DC, you can use Centrify DirectControl. [centrify.com]
~Philly
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it is pretty easy to do stuff like point an entire OU to a WSUS server and specify how updates are done.
Apparently, you haven't heard of Red Hat Network or Satellite Server.
It allows you to place all systems in groups and apply specific update packages to those groups.
Network Bare Metal Installation is blazing fast with PXE boot and kickstart.
System configuration can be completely automated with cfEngine or Puppet.
Even without these tools, basic scripting knowledge allows you to do this with pre-installed tools or little helper apps like clusterSSH
I admit all of the above tools have a rather steep learning cu
Re:System restore stinks. Image your disk (Score:4, Informative)
you are a pussy, AC.
AD is ldap + bind + all the ldap client software + stuff linux doesn't have like gpos + ability to integrate with wsus, exchange, forefront, etc.
AD is BASED ON ldap, sure enough. it's way more than that.
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Granted, theres no production release yet, but there are few people running it in production already.
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tar zcvf `date '+%Y%m%d'`_configs.tgz /etc
Try date +%F for more concisosity. I made that word up, btw.
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Don't rely only on system restore (Score:3, Informative)
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Yes. if a system is important to you, then backup with a bare-metal restore is the only way to be sure.
Any professional who tells different is directly responsible for loss of data.
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> Yes. if a system is important to you,
I try not to keep anything important on windows boxes or laptops so I never have to bother to back them up. So far, the only thing I found out the hard way I had to backup is my configuration file for game controls that the Logitech Profiler uses. It took me quite a while to reconfigure my games when Windows failed.
In some way, I could pretend that I do not have to trust Windows for the integrity of my data. I use shares on my file server to save things and reposito
Re:Don't rely only on system restore (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is, advanced tools are just that, advanced. Windows comes with bare metal tools, and the ability to properly configure a daily, weekly, etc, backup on external disk. And there are more advanced features for the adventurous. I guarantee you I won't lose data if my Windows box dies. I have daily backups, a RAID10 internal with a hot spare, blah blah blah. But I'm not a typical user.
And neither are you. We both know how to use our OS to protect our data, even if it involved what appears to be wizardry to the average user. I really wish backup were easier. Windows 7 actually informs the user regularly that they don't have a backup, and will continue to warn them if a backup ever fails. That's great progress, but it's maybe not yet good enough. Let me know when a popular Linux distro supports bare metal backup and a snapshotting filesystem with the ability to "go back in time" to a good state, I look forward to that day. Until then, you have your wizardry, I have my slightly-less-magical-looking GUI that manages most of it for me built in. *shrugs*
IMO, I'd like to get to the point where OSes, Windows, Mac, Linux, really, seriously warn the user the moment their data isn't safe. It's one thing for Windows 7 to pop up a notification balloon, or for OS X to complain that Time Machine isn't set up, but I feel like there should be more than that. And on Linux, I don't think there's anything comparable at the moment.
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I'm not sure even tools like Acronis are really safe since they run under, and are subject to restrictions imposed by Windows. For example using Easeus Partition Manager to clone the boot partition of your main drive to another clean drive will not produce a bootable disk, even if you copy the hidden boot partition (whose raison d'etre M$ claims is bitlocker). I don't believe anything that runs under Windows will make a perfect duplicate of your boot disk-- if you want to have a spare drive in your desk
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I don't believe anything that runs under Windows will make a perfect duplicate of your boot disk-- if you want to have a spare drive in your desk that can be swapped in for your failed C:\ drive without a hiccup,
Nope, Acronis (and I assume others as well--I specify Acronis because it was mentioned, and I use it) disk images can be used to do a bare-metal restore in the event of software or disk failure. You'd need either (a) previously-created rescue media, or (b) another machine with Acronis and (i) a spare SATA/IDE port or (ii) a USB disk enclosure. Works like a charm. In fact, IIRC, the replacement disk doesn't even need to be of the same size, except under certain circumstances.
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The irony is that Acronis boot media is Linux-based.
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I've used Ghost and Clonezilla to make replacement bootable hard drives just fine. I can't imagine Acronis really fails in this regard, or it wouldn't be taken seriously.
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Note: Most Live Linux and Unix discs will not complete booting from a SATA optical drive-- not sure why. You must use PATA
Depends on the distro and your hardware. For example, Gentoo's minimal CD won't boot on my desktop (or wouldn't as of a few months ago), because it is missing drivers for my motherboard; Ubuntu's LiveCD works fine. (I only have SATA drives.)
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I can heartily recommend Carbon Copy Cloner. :-)
Can't be affecting all users (Score:5, Informative)
I just checked and I have 9 restore points going back two weeks. I would have restarted several times in that period. The summary makes it sound as if this is a bug that affects all users. I don't think that is the case.
Yeah or maybe it's not affecting most Windows 7 users.
Re:Can't be affecting all users (Score:5, Funny)
Warning: Your style of discussion hinders M$ bashing on slashdot and might get you banned.
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It's kdawson. You can't expect fact-checking.
Re:Can't be affecting all users (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kdawson. You can't expect fact-checking.
I kind of think this guy takes a bit of undeserved heat sometimes, but the 'story' here is a link to a forum thread with fewer than 10 posts (at the time of this reply). That doesn't seem front page worthy, well, anywhere.
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Posted by kdawson
'nuff said.
Re:Can't be affecting all users (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed, I've restarted over a dozen times due to me mucking around and changing stuff via the registry. I've got 9 restore points going back to the 5th of april.
Re:Can't be affecting all users (Score:5, Informative)
I have 14 restore points dating back to 3/29/2010 which is about when I installed Windows 7 on this machine.
A quick Bing search brought me to another thread where the guy's problem turned out to be a disk defrag utility that was deleting restore points on reboot. He disabled the utility, and the restores stopped disappearing.
For what it's worth, does a forum post from January with a total of five people reporting a problem really deserve to be on Slashdot? Oh wait, it's anti-MS. Nevermind.
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but come on, if the defragmentation utility does not play nice with the system restore utility,
He didn't say it was "the" defragmentation utility (that is, the one that ships with the OS.) He said it was "a" defragmentation utility (that is, one that was written by a retard in 20 minutes for Windows 98 and still ships because if it doesn't actually crash it *must* work correctly still, right?"
why should a filesystem even fragment in the first place?
It doesn't, actually. Unless disk space is critically low,
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P.S.=> Are they actually DOING that (fostering this type of sentiment around here)? I don't know, but, it would make a LOT of sense from the site owner's perspective @ least, to actually do so, for the purposes of monetary gain via website page hits adbanner monetary generation! apk
My guess is that they're too incompetent to be doing it on purpose, but they might luck into it.
Don't jump the gun blaming Win7 (Score:3, Interesting)
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It can be a perfectly legitimate bug that just requires stars to be aligned in certain way etc - it's not like Windows source code is fully verified for correctness.
It's probably not really newsworthy if it only affects so few people, though. At best, if this gets verified as a genuine bug, you'll see it fixed on some Patch Tuesday next month, and that's it.
System restore! So we meet again, my nemesis! (Score:5, Funny)
It's going to be a rough one! A working restore is like catching the white whale. Sure you can do it but it might kill you
in the process.
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Does anyone actually know someone whose problem was fixed by System Restore? I sure don't...
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I know of problems caused by trying to use it, does that count?
Just because it's evil windows (Score:4, Insightful)
So a few people have a problem with windows? It's not even widespread!
This wouldn't have made it to slashdot if it weren't for the oh-so-common hatred for windows around these lands.
Windows won't go away by mocking it (Score:4, Informative)
Probably not a Win 7 bug... (Score:5, Interesting)
Given the recent similar issue with supposedly buggy Windows updates, I say this is an undetected root kit cleaning up after itself.
WIndows 7 is still overall stable, but... (Score:2)
... it has weird quirky bugs. I have this desktop refresh problem on my new office machine with 64-bit Windows 7 HP. Hopefully, SP1 fixes these things!
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Oops, I forgot to post the URL to the refresh problem: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproui/thread/09fd46ff-65f1-4fa7-ae2d-9f3b2644fad6/ [microsoft.com] ...
Bugs on your Windows 7 system restore? (Score:2)
This is a surprise? (Score:2)
Huh? (Score:2)
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The main purpose of "System Restore" in Windows is to recover from an installation of a badly written and malfunctioning driver, when said malfunction hampers normal OS functionality, or even prevents the system from booting altogether.
The reason why you don't have that problem in Linux is because, most likely, the only third-party driver you use there - if any - is the graphics one.
So the chances of running into a badly broken one are lower (though not non-existing; e.g. the recent kernel update has messed
hmmm (Score:2)
System Restore is a security problem (Score:3, Funny)
Could be worse (Score:3, Funny)
Yesterday I needed to boot into windows (the D&DI Character Generator doesn't work in wine, as far as I can tell), and I was greeted after boot with a lovely screen telling me that the system was broken and in need of repair. So my two options were restore from backup or repair. I had no backup, so I went to repair, and under "select drive," there was no system install. Windows had apparently uninstalled itself.
I'm still trying to sort out what happened.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Informative)
I thought I had this, but then I double checked and realized I had my system restore max space set to 700mb. My single restore point was taking up 555mb of this. I upped the space. Maybe some people are being too over zealous with cranking down the space? (I forgot how much it took up when I set it I guess.)
[Edit: Looks like the accepted solution on that thread simply increases the space allocated to System Restore! I could be right, maybe?]
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
Tell that to Gentoo Linux and their default WIPE /tmp ON BOOT option!
Perhaps my own fault for keeping stuff i need in /tmp, but still no excuse.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Informative)
Are you kidding me? /tmp is TEMPORARY! It's transient - that's the whole point!
Programs that store data of ANY permanence in /tmp are broken. People who store data of ANY permanence in /tmp are foolish.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
Foolish? I think that's an understatement. Using temp for storage is like getting angry when people flush your shit down a toilet.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Informative)
i don't know about you but i prefer to be alone while i'm taking a dump, and I generally flush before opening the door. so, if someone is in there with me flushing before i leave, then i'd probably be a little pissed.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
The urinal knows nothing...
The janitor on the other hand, sitting in his room behind his desk filled with rows of video monitors, VCR's and 'flush' buttons...
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We've got a bathroom full of auto flushing urinals and toilets at my work. The bathroom also has motion controlled lights. Somehow the flush sensors aren't quite calibrated correctly, so the first person to enter the room after the lights have been off for a while gets to experience a symphony of half a dozen toilets flushing together. It's pretty weird first thing in the morning.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
That is where I keep all of my important documents.
I have a nasty habbit of wiping out my home directory and ever since the janitor app died it's been a good world writable location.
Now I can share important projects, personal documents and data troves.
In fact the tmp directory worked so well for my data needs that I moved all of home to that directory. I wanted to facilitate synergy between users.
Eventually a friend gave me a wonderful suggestion of migrating the entire operating system to tmp. Through a clever array of symlinks I have moved all the original folders to tmp and created links in the original locations. I now have the best of both worlds!
This is pretty much all thanks to a friend of mine who has a sys admin gig at a nearby college. He's even helping me work out a new system of backups via the high speed tape interface "/dev/null."
He is pretty friendly so if you are on irc you can look him up under his nick BOFH for some friend sys admin tips.
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There's a wealthy woman on my block who's been married so many times that she keeps her wedding pictures in a temporary folder.
(DVD's are on sale in the lobby, don't forget to tip your waitress.)
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my own fault for keeping stuff i need in /tmp
Yeah....
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Tell that to Gentoo Linux and their default WIPE /tmp ON BOOT option! /tmp, but still no excuse.
Perhaps my own fault for keeping stuff i need in
To be fair, I blame this on a lack of good Linux documentation.
Referencing the gentoo howto titled "Production database environment on tmpfs ramdisk" section 3 subsection 2a, they provide clear and simple wiring guides for attaching a car battery to your RAM, thus removing the need to reboot and preserving your /tmp data.
To summarize, get yourself a car battery and a set of old jumper cables.
Cut the connectors off one end of the cables, and strip about 1/8th inch of insulation off the end, twisting the stra
Yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
And they erase all my memory too! All of it just gone, empty blank state every time I pull the power! And when I took out my HD and cleaned it under the tap to get the dirty bits out, Gentoo totally failed to work with my freshly cleaned drive!!!
And to remain on topic, anyone actually use system restore? Always disable that as fast as possible.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the contrary. It is *extremely* rude to throw up a confirmation dialog before every trivial system maintenance task.
As has been pointed out below, System Restore is basically only useful for resolving problems so severe they prevent your system from booting. Once your system has booted you don't really need older restore points, and they take up a *lot* of space. Deleting them is absolutely the right decision for the average user. The *real* problem here is probably the UI for creating system restore points not mentioning the deletion policies and generally misleading people into believing that creating restore points manually is a useful thing to do.
These people creating restore points all the time remind me of the people who get obsessed with defragmenting their disks every night...
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Interesting)
It makes perfect sense to remove the oldest restore point when there is not enough room to create a new one. No matter how much disk space you allocate to System Restore at some point you are going to fill it up. Having it prompt the user would cause it to prompt every time after that. For people who don't understand System Restore very well this kind of prompt might lead to more harm than good. If someone gets a warning saying their system restore space is full, they might clear it out completely, especially if they were getting this message on a regular basis.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:4, Informative)
The point of system restore is to ensure that if you mess up your computer with recent updates or changes you have an easy restoration option. So, on a typical new PC with 1TB you would have 150GB. Per the grandparent, a typical restore was taking 555mb for him. You do the math.
Now to assume that a user will be prompted on every single boot or system change after the limit is pretty silly when this will almost only ever affect someone who has changed from the default value. Users who leave this setting to default will never suffer this fate.
It seems that the submitter of the article has "tweaked" his machine so much that he only saves 1 restore point and therefore waits EVERY boot for the system restore to do what it should do.
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In any case - whenever I have encountered problems with Windows I have never been able to get any useful recovery by using the "Last known good configuration..." It has always been a reinstall if I weren't able to boot normally.
So I would say that the system recovery feature is erratic as it is at best.
Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How prevalent? (Score:4, Informative)
System restore is more than just the registry. If you cannot login (even after trying "last known good configuration"), then you can try system restore by booting off of the OS CD/DVD and "repairing" your installation. If you log in successfully and something does not work, then you can also try system restore. And yes, system restore WILL fix your computer by bringing it to an older state at which everything worked, given that: 1) you don't have hardware issues 2) a virus has not infested your restore points and 3) you have restore points before the problem started.
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Several times windows update has borked internet access outside the local subnet[1]. In one of the cases it wouldn't even connect to MS, so it couldn't fix itself. Rolling back to a restore point did the trick. I then waited a few days till the fix for the fix was out...
P.S. I have it set to "Check, but ask before installing". Anyone else find that sometimes it just goes ahead and does it?
[1] I think it does this when there's a pending update for IE.
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It can be the problem. But is this the default for Win7? If so, it's Microsoft's fault anyway, as if a single restore point eats up 550Mb the default total limit could never be set to 700Mb.
Another question is why the restore point uses half a gig, when XPs restore points are a lot smaller than that...
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Re:How prevalent? (Score:5, Funny)
[Edit: Looks like the accepted solution on that thread simply increases the space allocated to System Restore! I could be right, maybe?]
Wait! You can edit slashdot posts after posting? I thought they were final! When did this happen?
[Edit: Wow. This is amazing. Looks like its working here on my end. How about you guys?]
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My last 2 upgrades of ubuntu were pretty crappy.
I once did an upgrade of suse that lost everything. Every. Last. File.
You can do disk imaging in any OS pretty much.
But nice karma whoring.
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There's no buggy restore feature for you to try and save it
chroot. And yes it can be buggy just like AC suggests.
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Neither is System Restore on Windows.
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Yes XP works. However it carries a monster sized piece of baggage. It is the most infected attacked security problem ridden OS on the planet.
Because of XP we still see a stunningly large number of IE 6 users. People who are basically handing over the keys to the house and the wallet each time they go on the net.
XP needs to die. Vista needs to go along with it. Win 7 needs to super cede. For simple privacy and security reasons.
XP is broke. You just can't see the monster sized crack. Others have seen i
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had 7 had the same level of widespread usage, it would be in the same position.
Not really. With 7, you can actually reasonably work under a non-admin account, because it is easy to elevate as needed. XP didn't have that - at best, you could explicitly do "run as administrator" on the shortcut, or use "runas" in command line, but there were several other problems with that, and, of course, the convenience just isn't there.
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With Windows, it's nice to do a clean install every year or so anyway, to handle bitrot [drdobbs.com].
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PC games.
When I can play every single PC game on Linux, I will.
I'm not against Linux, I'm actually an LPI and Novell certified Linux admin. I just play games.
Re: Why Baby Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
The latest Ubuntu 10.X is so good it is scary. Why anyone wants to run a Windows machine is really beyond my understanding. Do yourself a huge favor and climb off the Microsoft teat.
Maybe because some people have work to do? Maybe because they get paid to use windows applications? Or maybe because they want to run some specific applications such as games that won't run well on the latest Ubuntu?
Not everyone WANTS to fiddle with their computer, some just want to do stuff with it then go away and do something else. This is why the Mac is popular too. Narrowing yourself down to a single choice of OS and outright saying "Ubuntu is better!" is just foolish. It is like saying that Perl is better than C - but you don't even know what the problem is that is trying to be solved yet! It might be that a totally different language is better than perl or C, but without knowing what the goal is, you can't pick the best solution.
For the record, I am typing this on an iMac, with a XP Pro system next to me, and a Mythbuntu system off to the side as well as 2 other machines that I often change out OS'es on for different purposes. (Currently Redhat is on them at the moment).
Outright saying "Why anyone Wants to run Windows" ignores that different people want different things from their computers. Your solution is not theirs.
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