System restore: Did I do something stupid?

[fdcg27]

Yesterday I came home from work after leaving the PC on its dialup through the day downloading the usual blizzard of MS updates for November.
I clicked and installed the updates and then restarted the PC as most MS updates require.
The PC would not boot after the restart.
I tried last known good configuration and safe mode, and the machine would then restart itself after getting past bios and beginning to start Windows.
The machine dates from 2006 (not a bad life) and lacking any better plan, I decided to use system restore.
We have no important files on the machine, since we mainly use it as an online shopper, a surfer and an email checker.
Even with the dialup, text pages, like those here, load quickly.
Most of our important files reside on external media or can be found on an email server.
Anyway, the system restored nicely, aleit with its orginal 2006 load.
The first thing I did was to download IE8, since IE6 showed up as part of the orginal load. This also required a small Windows update patch.
There remain a number of updates that I'll need to download. The OS is XP, which we've liked.
Anyway, did I really need to do what I did, or was there a simpler alternative?

 

[dparm]

System Restore is the MS Windows built-in utility to roll back to earlier configurations.

What you are describing is a manufacturer recovery partition that nukes the machine and totally resets it to the way it came from the factory.

In my opinion, yes, you probably overreacted. I would've used XP's System Restore to roll back a single day before the updates were applied and then performed some investigation and troubleshooting.

 

[fdcg27]

Could I have gotten to the MS restore without getting Windows to start?

 

[Quattro Pete]

Originally Posted By: fdcg27
Could I have gotten to the MS restore without getting Windows to start?

You said you were able to start in Safe Mode. In Safe Mode, you should have been able to do a system restore, as dparm described.

 

[SevenBizzos]

You might have tried other things, like working from safe mode to figure it out, and still ended up at the same place. You didn't do any harm. It just stinks having to d/l all the updates afterwards....and with a dial-up (gosh, I haven't seen one in 15 years!) I would imagine the better part of a day's worth of updates to download.

 

[Drew99GT]

Originally Posted By: fdcg27

Anyway, did I really need to do what I did, or was there a simpler alternative?


That was probably overkill, but in the future, especially if you're using Windows 7 or 8, I prefer the imaging feature over system restore, because imaging will make your computer exactly the way it was before you had the problem. Restore sometimes causes problems.

 

[fdcg27]

No, I wrote that I couldn't start in safe mode.
If I could have, I would have restored the system to the previous day, or at least the most recent available restore point.
That much I do know.

 

[Drew99GT]

This is EXACTLY where imaging is the best solution. You could have inserted the rescue CD and booted off of it and reinstalled an image of your system and it would have been like nothing happened. It's not built into XP though, but Windows 7 professional and 8 have it built into the operating system.

 

[fdcg27]

Where we live, unless we had either cable or a dish, the dialup is the only choice.
No DSL availability here.
SP3 will download in time to install tomorrow morning.
At least I had SP2 as the factory load, since that would otherwise have involved a long download just to then download SP3.
We have not had any real problems with this PC over the years, so I can't complain.
One bonus is that the HD is now incredibly smooth and quiet, as though I'd just put Pennzoil Conventional 10w40 in it.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Originally Posted By: fdcg27
No, I wrote that I couldn't start in safe mode.

In that case you probably did the only thing that you could have at that point.

 

[fdcg27]

That's what I thought, but I know that there are better computer heads here than I.
I could have just waited until my wife got home with her smart phone and asked here then, but I went ahead and did the deed.

 

[Donald]

Just learn a lesson, backup images! Ghost or Win 7 has its own.

XP is history. Move on. Win 7 is great. Stop short of Win 8 however.

I am IBM mainframe guy and we have been backing up stuff since the 1960s. So its natural for me to backup everything

I use Win 7 backup and create images and incrementals on a 2TB ESata attached drive. Thats what Windows sees. In reality its a pair of 2TB drives RAID 1 connected.

Bottom line, is never have only ONE copy of anything.

 

[fdcg27]

It look like XP is going to be history pretty shortly.
Too bad, but it's run well for the seven years we've had this box, up until yesterday's crash.
You like Win 7?
I have Win 8 at work and it's okay, nothing bad.
I've been thinking of either an Apple or maybe a box running Linux.
We don't do enough on our home computer that compatibility would be any issue.
It would be nice to have an OS nobody writes anything bad to attack, largely because almost nobody uses the OS.

 

[Ramblejam]

Originally Posted By: fdcg27
I've been thinking of either an Apple or maybe a box running Linux.


Recently made the jump to a Linux distro on an old '06 laptop (Core Duo, 2GB RAM). Runs wonderfully.

 

[fdcg27]

...hmm,
must regain old knowledege and partition HD to try Linux.
I've sometimes thought to, just never done it.
Do you have any browser issues with any sites with Linux?

 

[Ramblejam]

No website issues at all -- running Chrome, so the experience and interface is almost identical to the Windows OS. Even with this archaic thing, I'm able to use the graphics hardware to accelerate webpage rendering. Very fast.

Here's the OS (I've demoed just about all the popular distros, and this is my choice): http://elementaryos.org/