Good morning. I'm XXXXX XXXXXXXX, a/k/a "DrKlahn," one of the XP die-hards.

The number of restore points available in XP can be limited by the amount of space that is allocated. This gets to be complicated, depending on the size of the system disk. The default percentage is 10% of the drive, but this can be changed -- see the image below:

We can see that on my system, I've turned off System Restore on everything but the system drive, and I've cut the amount of space for Restore Points back to only 3% of the drive. This is acceptable for me - I do frequent full backups. For others ... maybe not so good.

That should be sufficient unless the system drive is extremely small. Any idea how big the system drive is?

Open My Computer, right-click on the C: partition and select "Properties." This will drop down a window with information on the system drive.

Should be more than sufficient if the Restore Point limit is 12%. Let's check that. Go to Start, Settings, Control Panel. Double-click System, click on System Restore. The box that says "Turn off System Restore on all drives" should be UNchecked. If so, left-click on C:, then click the "Settings" button. This will pop up a window that shows what percentage of the drive is allocated for system restore, and the amount in either megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB). What does the system report for space allocated to system restore?

Thank you. Please go back up in the session to the first image, and click on that to bring it up to full size. That image shows what you should be seeing on the System Restore tab, and after clicking the "Settings" button. Are you seeing something else?

Sometimes I do wish we were allowed to remote into client computers ... Can you take a screenshot of the screen showing that, and post it into this session?

How to take a screenshot under Windows:


Bring up the display to be captured. Press the PrintScreen (on some keyboards, "PrtScr") key. This captures the screen to the Clipboard. Note that there is no obvious effect when the PrintScreen key is pressed.


Go to Accessories and start Paint. On the Paint menu, click Edit and select Paste. This copies the screen image into Paint. On the Paint menu, click File and select Save As. Save the image to any hard drive on the system, but not to the Desktop.


Click the PaperClip tool at the top of the JustAnswer session window to upload the file. This will open a new window. Click the Browse button. This opens another window where you can browse to the desired image file. Click OK and wait for the image file to upload. After it does, the window will close. Then click on "Insert" in the previous window, and the image will be inserted into the session.


If you have problems using the JustAnswer PaperClip image loader, I recommend the image storage service at www.tinypic.com.


Go to www.tinypic.com. Click the Browse button to find the image file you want to upload. Then click the "Upload Now" button. You must solve a simple text puzzle on the next page. After this, a new window appears with four links to the image. Use the one labeled "Direct link for layouts." Click in that box, type control-A, and then control-C to copy the link.


Return to this session and click the PaperClip tool at the top of the session menu. In the drop-down menu, click in the box that says "link to web graphic" and type control-V. Then click the Insert button. This drops the image into the session.

I have dropped in the instructions above, starting below the heading titled "How to take a screenshot under Windows"

Thank you for trying. Let's go at this one step at a time and see we can find where the problem is occurring. Close all the system information windows that were previously opened.

Click Start, then Settings, then Control Panel. This should open the Control Panel window. Let me know if this is OK.

Double-click on System. This should open up the System Properties window.

There should be several (on my system, seven) tabs at the top of the window.

Click on the System Restore tab. This should switch the window to the System Restore display.

On this display you should see "Turn off System Restore on all drives" UNchecked, "Monitoring" next to drive C:, and a button at right that says "Settings."

There is no "Settings" button?

I've never encountered this on XP. Please click Start, then Run, and type "winver" (without quotes) into the text box. Then click OK. This will bring up a small window titled "About Windows." What does it say about your system?

Thank you. Does it say XP Home, Professional, or Media Center Edition?

One moment while I research this. I can't believe that your system has been restricted by a group policy change, but I can't think of any other explanation for it, either.

I have the procedure to check this out, but it is a bit complicated. Do you want to continue?

As the farmer said, "What's time to a pig?" Consider me the pig.

Click Start, Run, and enter "gpedit.msc" into the text box. Then click OK.

You should now have the Group Policy editor screen. This is a hierarchical set of permissions and privileges. You navigate it like the Windows Explorer - click on a categore in the left pane, and expand things within that category by click on the plus-in-a-boxes below the category.

In the left pane, click on Computer Configuration.

In the right pane, double-click on Administrative Templates.

In the right pane, double-click on System.

In the right pane, double-click on System Restore.

There should be two options showing now in the right pane. Both of them should say "Not configured."

Is it possible that you are running as a user without Administrator privileges?

Click Start, Settings, Control Panel.

In Control Panel, double-click "User Accounts." This will bring up the User Accounts window.

One moment; I'm going to drop in a picture of what you should see.

The account/username that you use should appear on that screen. It should also say "Computer administrator" as I've highlighted in red for myself.

Thank you. Please bear with me a moment while I think about this.

I am checking the System Restore interface on my own system. Please bear with me.

I am going to drop in another picture.

This is the screen you see when you attempt to do a System Restore, yes?

Thank you. I can explain what is happening, but not why. I have not seen this behavior before on an XP system, and from the research that I have been doing during our conversation, it should not be occurring.

There is a problem in the user interface to the Restore facility in Control Panel. This should not be possible unless the Group Policy restricts it; nonetheless, it is there and there is no way to check the Restore storage allocation without going into the System Registry directly. While that situation should be investigated, it is of no importance in the immediate situation, because I am pretty sure that the system is telling you the truth, and there is only one Restore Point.

I am now going to ask the question I should have asked 90 minutes ago: What is the reason you need to do the system restore?

OK. Let me address those problems one at a time.

An XP Restore Point is not a system image. What it does is journals system files that have been changed - only system files, no user files. This prevents System Restore from destroying important things like email data files, user documents ... anything that you, a user, might have created.

Therefore, restoring the system to an earlier Restore Point does not restore any missing files that relate directly to you as a user.

The only way to restore files that have been destroyed by malware or a virus ... or a mouse click slip ... is with an external hard drive, and backup software that backs up the system regularly.

I strongly recommend buying and using an external backup, but on the other hand, if everybody did, I wouldn't have this wonderful career.

Now, as to the speed and performance problems ... are they persisting?

Have you investigated the contents of the system's Event Logs to see if there are any recurring problems?

Click Start, Settings, Control Panel, double-click Administrative Tools. In the window that opens up, double-click Event Viewer. This will open up the Event Viewer window, which I will drop in a picture of below ...

There are several categories in the left pane, but the only ones of interest are Applications and System.

eh?

OK. Clicking once on the category in the left pane brings up the corresponding log in the right pane.

The only things we are interested in are yellow-flag or red-flag events. Double-clicking on the event will bring up the description as a new window ... 1200 events?

Do they fall into more or less the same category over and over again?

Have a look at a couple of the application error entries, and see what they say.

Yeah, I see that on my system too occasionally.

Not every event worth logging is worth logging, as it were.

Well, let's see where we can go from here. Has the disk drive been defragmented recently?

OK. Let's investigate what is running automatically at system startup. There is almost always something looking guilty around that area.

Go to the Microsoft web site, at the link below:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902

Download the package, the link is located below the line that says "Published May 14, 2012."

Save the ZIP file into any convenient directory.

Let me know once you have downloaded the file.

Now here I must extrapolate a bit, as I have an unZIP program installed on my system and you may not. Locate the ZIP file with Windows Explorer and double-click on it. This should open up what looks like a folder. Click anywhere in the "folder" and type control-A, then control-C. Now go up one level out of that folder. Type control-V. This should deposit 4 files in that folder.

You should end up with the 4 files shown in the image above, plus whatever else was originally in that folder.

OK. Double-click on "autoruns.exe", agree to the agreement. This will open up the Autoruns program. Click on the Logon tab within the window and you should see a display like the one below:

In a healthy XP system, there should be no more than a dozen items in the Logon window.

What are you seeing on your system?

I think you are probably not on the Logon tab. Check to see that the Logon tab is the one clicked at the top of the window.

OK. Normally I would ask for a screenshot here but we've established there are problems with that. Can you give me a brief description of what is listed?

Most unusual. I am forbidden from asking this, but can you email me a screenshot showing that display?

I see. What is the name of the screenshot file?

OK. Let's try this another way. Go to the link below:

http://tinypic.com/index.php

and use the Browse button. Locate the screenshot file. Then click the "Upload Now" button.

Scratch that, the site is down.

OK, I have a workaround. Click anywhere in the Autoruns window. Then click the File menu, and select Save. Choose a folder to save the file in. At the bottom of the Save window, change the option from "Autoruns Data" to "Text." Then click the Save button.

Let me know when you've got that far.

Let me know the photobucket address to obtain the image.

There should be something on the page that looks like a URL to see the image - it'll start with "http://"

OK. Uncheck the boxes next to the following items:

hkcmd module

igfxTray module

Java(TM) Update Scheduler

Do you actually use Windows Messenger?

Uncheck that one as well, then.

This will produce a very minor improvement in speed and a small speedup in system startup time.

You said that you've scanned your system with AVG. I take it that nothing was found?

OK. There is another defragmenter that I normally do not recommend for end users, but it is worth investigating in this case as I haven't seen anything yet that accounts for performance problems.

None. It's something that was left over from a previous installation of something, but was not properly removed when that application was removed from the system. It is unfortunately far too common - manufacturers are more interested in getting their products into a system than getting them out cleanly.

There is another tool from Microsoft at the page below:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426

Same procedure as the previous one - download it, unpack it, and copy the contents into a folder.

XP can't be reloaded over the internet, and while I do it every couple of years on general principles, I can't recommend it for anyone else except in dire circumstances. In this case I define "dire" as "the system is on fire, throw a bucket of water on it, now what do we do, it's broken."

If you have a computer-type friend who dotes on this stuff, you could have XP back up and running in two or three days from a dead start, but it would be a busy three days, and every software package you use would have to be reloaded as well.

Much as I dislike saying it, I think that is the case. There is clearly something wrong with the System Restore setup, and the only way to get rid of that is with a complete reload of XP from scratch, but that is a major undertaking, and even I have to keep the old system disk around for a month to re-copy all the stuff that I forget to copy.

There is a lot of other things that can be checked to improve system performance, but I am reaching the end of my waking hours and if I keep at this, soon there will be the Big Mistake.

My pleasure. Come visit us again sometime.