Jill:
I do not and will not spend more than 3 seconds messing with XP's useless "Restore points" and "Recovery Console" both of those are useless in my opinion.
In the past I have tried spending countless hours in the "recovery room: fixing the boot mbr and plenty of other vodoo I wont bore you with. Most of the time I was able to restore a booting windows but it was very sluggish and slow or else had other anomolies.
Most people get the wrong idea about what restore point "can" and "cant" do
restore point is a driver fixer only if you install a new driver which causes a crash you can use restore point to return your system to the drivers used prior to the install restore point does NOT back-up your data, software etc if you trash some files needed by the OS restore point (a life jacket with a big hole in it!) can not return you to the good ole days
thats why cloning & imaging is the "way" to fly
I dont and wont spend two seconds playing with either one of those severely limited fixers.
if my systems so much as burp, I simply restore the drive with an image file or plug in another cloned drive
no more botched voodo for this old hacker >>>>> dont have the time to mess with tools that dont work
well >>>>>> it detracts from my TSF time
I began a year ago imaging and teaching my customers how to image; now when they bring in their downed machines, (gotta love registry cleaners; my clents are drawn to them like a moth to lite) i can say wait 15 minutes then I put in the bootable image recovery CD and shee-bang its back up and running without any further adoo
of course then the whining starts, LOL they havent been keeping up with regular back-ups so the image does not match their last date of computer usage. tisk tisk tisk whoes fault is that ??????? after all I am only a disciple of ole be ells abub not a magician!