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Beginners Guides: Little Known Features of WindowsXP
Beginners Guides: Little Known Features of WindowsXP - PCSTATS
We will explore the features and abilities of WinXP, with an eye towards providing a better understanding of the capabilities of the operating system, and the options available to the user.
Filed under: Beginners Guides Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: PCSTATS Jul 30 2007   M. Dowler  
Home > Reviews > Beginners Guides > PCSTATS

Operating System Restore

You can also resize dynamic volumes to include free space on other dynamic disks, a process known as spanning. Dynamic disk groups can be transferred between supporting computers by physically moving the drives then importing them into the disk manager, essentially merging the groups.

Dynamic disks are necessary for creating striped and mirrored drives, XP's RAID capabilities. As the boot drive (the drive containing the Windows directory) cannot be resized, even if it made dynamic, this feature is primarily useful on systems with two or more physical drives.

Dynamic drives have several limitations, namely they must be created on drives using the NTFS file system, they cannot be read by any Windows operating system other than Windows 2000, XP professional and Windows Server 2003. They can also not be created on drives which contain earlier versions of Windows or non-Windows operating systems, since they will render these unreadable.

Windows System Restore

A feature new to Windows XP, system restore is an advanced version of the 'rollback' option found first in Windows Me. Essentially system restore operates in the background and takes snapshots of your computer's configuration at set intervals. These snapshots contain a working backup of the windows registry, and a record of all other information necessary for restoring your computer functionally back to the point in time when the snapshot was taken.

For example, upon installing any new software, system restore first takes a snapshot of the existing system configuration and saves it to a portion of the hard disk reserved for this information. If the software in question manages to severely mess up your Windows installation, system restore can be used to restore the snapshot taken prior to installation, removing the offending software from the registry, and erasing the installed files from the hard drive.

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Of course, this will also remove any other software added since the restore point mentioned, though personal data (data in the 'my documents' folder or subfolders) will remain.

If you want to examine how system restore is set up on your system, go to 'start / programs/ accessories/ system tools/ system restore' then choose 'system restore settings.' From here you can choose whether you want system restore to be active on your system or not, and how much space you would like it to reserve for restore points on each drive.

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Contents of Article: PCSTATS
 Pg 1.  Beginners Guides: Little Known Features of WindowsXP
 Pg 2.  The Windows XP Event Viewer
 Pg 3.  Local Users and Groups
 Pg 4.  Hard Disk Management
 Pg 5.  Mounting Drives as Folders
 Pg 6.  To Mount a Partition as a Directory
 Pg 7.  — Operating System Restore
 Pg 8.  System Restore Continued
 Pg 9.  Windows Services
 Pg 10.  How to Disable a Service
 Pg 11.  Accessibility Options
 Pg 12.  Built in Backup Utility
 Pg 13.  Files and Setting Transfer Wizard / Local Computer Policy Settings
 Pg 14.  Windows Task Manager / Enabling Firewall

 
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