My apologies to my Mac customers and friends as this post is strictly about Windows 10!

Earlier this week, I had a customer log into Remote Technical Support (https://www.4kcc.com/rts) and their computer looked like it had just come out of the box.  Just about every program that had been installed was missing except for those which came with the computer.  Their data was still intact but tons of programs were gone.  What happened?

We see this pretty often – too often.  It happens when a computer user doesn’t understand the different ways of trying to “fix” things on their computer.  Windows 10 has four methods of resetting or recovering a computer and understanding the differences is critical.

This blog post will explain the first method and the next three blog postings will cover the other methods.

The first recovery option when things aren’t going well with your computer is “System Restore.”  This is the option that has been around since Windows ME (Wow!  Windows ME came out eighteen years ago!).  Your Windows computer automatically keeps restore points and when you install some programs, they create a restore point before installing.  The idea is that, if you install a program or make some other change that affects your computer in a negative way, you can go back and restore things as they were prior to the change. (You can also create manual restore points, if you so choose.)

The easiest way to get to the window you see at the top of this post is to search “system restore” in the taskbar search window.  When you do, “Create a restore point” will appear at the top of the search bar and when you click on that, you’ll get the system window as above.  You can also ask Cortana (“Hey Cortana” should be enabled.) to “create a restore point.”  Why type when you can talk?

Once the system window opens, click on System Restore and follow the wizard.  This is the safest of all four methods of fixing something that has gone astray.