Does anyone else find that Win10 system restore takes ages?

[mikeymikec]

Admittedly the two times I can think of lately were both on laptops with HDDs, but I've been sitting and waiting for a laptop to finish a system restore operation for about 1.5 hours now. I could understand it if this laptop was an absolute performance slouch, but it has an AMD A8 processor in (I don't know which exactly but it's not as if it's an Atom or an AMD E or C range CPU). The previous laptop I'm pretty sure had a sandy bridge i3. As I write this, the laptop has finally changed its status to "finalising system restore".

I'm doing the restore from Win10 setup rather than from within Windows, and due to another experience recently (on Vista), I have the feeling that I/O caching might be disabled (or something equally damaging to performance) in that mode, but at least it rules out things like security software or other software the user has installed being the cause of the slowness. At any rate, I'm pretty sure these aren't the first times I've done system restore from Windows setup, and while I very rarely use restore, it's still quite surprising.

 

[JHomes]

I didn't even know MS offered Windows System Restore in Windows 10, so I went out and picked up a snapshot tool (RollBack Rx) and rolled with that. It was only until months later that I realized MS offered it, but they disabled it by default and make it where restore points are fragile like glass and take forever to load. So I disabled it again and stuck with Rollback.

I just think MS doesn't care about it anymore, they're probably well aware people prefer 3rd party solutions.

 

[PliotronX]

It has come in extremely handy for fixing innocuous issues but malware usually screws it up. Disabled by default?? I will have to take note of this. It depends on how many changes there had been since the restore point was set. Judging by the aggressive nature of windows update in 10, there are probably quite a lot of updates to revert from which could explain the lengthy restoration.

 

[mikeymikec]

"disabled by default"

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/default-settings-on-win10.2493080/

 

[PliotronX]

"disabled by default"

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/default-settings-on-win10.2493080/

Gotcha! Interesting, it seems like 10 takes into account the premium space of SSD and more limited write cycles if true. Come to think of it, I think my clean installation on my office PC had it disabled. I thought it was some tweaking I had done prior to flipping through advanced system properties at the time. Thanks for the heads up!

 

[RLGL]

I have been using 10 for over 1 yr. Have not needed to restore yet. Do you have hardwares issues?

 

[mikeymikec]

I have been using 10 for over 1 yr. Have not needed to restore yet. Do you have hardwares issues?

Two customers' laptops, two different issues. They had both been phone-scammed and been locked out of their laptops (the SAM database lock method). On the off-chance I tried system restore on one of them and it actually worked. On the other it didn't.

 

[Elixer]

Restore or Reset? Reset does take a longish time depending on system, but restore takes only a few mins.

 

[mikeymikec]

restore.