Using Windows XP's System Restore Feature
There are many small changes or "tweaks" you can make to a Windows XP installation which can make your use of "Microsoft's best operating system to date™" more enjoyable. This is a tip which, on the surface, looks rather complicated and doesn't give a lot of return for the time involved, but it's worth a few minutes to free up some hard drive real estate for other uses. Just for the sake of being thorough, I'll wrap this small tip in a large article wrapper with all the toppings. ;)
By default, an installation of Windows XP (Home or Professional) uses a HUGE amount of space on your hard drive for a function known as "System Restore". This allows Windows to "roll back" your PC to a previous state of use. This is very handy if you've recently upgraded a program on your system, and suddenly find that it's made your machine very unstable. You can use this option to turn back time, as it were, to the day before you installed the buggy software, and (hopefully) your system will have regained its stability!
System restore saves the state of the machine, all of the files in the operating system (including the registry), as well as all of the files of installed applications. This set of saved information is called a restore point. The operating system periodically creates restore points on its own. In addition, newer applications will create restore points before their installation programs make any changes to the machine. Manual restore points can be created as well.
When a system restore is performed, the system is restored to the exact configuration that it had when the restore point was created. For example, if a user installs Office XP, and then subsequently restores the machine to a point before that installation, all traces of Office, from registry changes to installed files, are removed from the machine.
