How much of a performance hit do you take with System Restore in Windows XP Pro?

[NFS4]

See title

 

[IamDavid]

To much of a hit. Probably not the answer your looking for but on my PC it slows my boot time down and overall usage.. I always have it shut off on all my XP machines.. I just Ghost my drives occasionally..

 

[andrey]

Probably if you're running Windows XP on 486 you will see a performance hit, but on the 700MHz+ computers the performance hit is very minimal, but the benefits of having System Restore on are tremendous.

If you have a lot of free time, you can certainly spend an hour or two each day ghosting and imaging your entire configuration, but with System Restore everything is done for you automatically and System Restore is activated only when you install drivers, programs or make significant changes to your system configuration. I have System Restore turned on on all of my XP machines and I have never regreted it a bit.

 

[mOrphine]

winxp enables system restore on all the partitions on ur hdd by default, i only keep it active in the system partition since that's where it would have the most benefit 🙂

 

[ssanches]

How much of a performance hit do you take with System Restore in Windows XP Pro?

.....Large enough for me to disable it. I've always hated system restore. I know friends who've enabled system restore and yet they've had times when they couldn't recover their system from an inoperable state. It works mostly though, but I think I'll skip it!

 

[andrey]

.....Large enough for me to disable it. I've always hated system restore.

I'm just really curious how exactly you're measuring that performance hit and what exactly you're doing where you seeing that performance hit? I'm not really sure if you're aware or not, but System Restore isn't working 24/7, it is only activated when you boot up or when you install new programs or drivers.

 

[Nafets]

With something like System Restore, and quite a few other 'enabled-by-default' WinXP services, the performance hit is usually not tangible (measurable), in every day use, with today's PC's.

But to the benchmark guru, or system tweaker, disabling these things can bring the satisfaction of knowing that your PC is running at full speed, and not possibly bogged down by a mysterious background program.

If you backup your files, and/or ghost your hard drive frequently, then you'd be fine disabling System Restore. Those that value a more secure system, and are more infrequent with your backups, System Restore can be that helping hand...

 

[scottrico]

I see no hit to proformance on my 1.8a @2400 p4 rig.

But it has saved my a** a few time.

peace

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: scottrico
I see no hit to proformance on my 1.8a @2400 p4 rig.

But it has saved my a** a few time.

peace

its saved me a couple times too... and I havent noticed any decrease in performance compared to win98.

 

[JackMDS]

I run 2.4GHz with 512MB DDR2700. I can not stand the system restore.

You can not measure it by straight Performance Hit. It is a matter of nuisance you can not control the timing and it does it own shticks, sometimes irrupting or making you wait when it pleases.

Give it a try with or without, it takes few seconds to disable or enable it.

 

[RalfHutter]

Originally posted by: andrey
......If you have a lot of free time, you can certainly spend an hour or two each day ghosting and imaging your entire configuration,

I use Drive Image and it takes me about 3 minutes to make an image of my 3.5GB+ OS/Apps boot drive. At the end of the night I start it going, go brush my teeth, mess around with the little lady, come back 4 minutes later and it's done. Shut down the computer and off to sleep. No bugs at all for me with Drive Image. System Restore is not quite so fool-proof.

 

[Mem]

How much of a performance hit do you take with System Restore in Windows XP Pro?

Good question,I use it all the time and have not notice any slowdowns etc,sure it takes a little time to shutdown at night when I turn my PC off but no big deal,I also backup all my favourite software to CD-RW,system restore has saved my OS once due to a third party software program,I think it`s worth keeping system restore on.

System Restore is not quite so fool-proof.

That might be true ,but it`s better to leave it on then off,then it would be really useless 😉.

 

[Amused]

I have system restore activated, and my system is plenty fast. Hell, it takes the top position in 3DMark for processor speed and video card. That's all I care about 😉

(It really does hold the top spot for P4 2267-2333 and GF Ti500 It also holds the top spot for P4 2167-2233 and GF Ti500) 😀

 

[Pcteck]

I wouldn't live without it. Hell that's the only reason I used Win Me when it first came out. System Restore has saved my ass a few times.

I recommend to everyone to LEAVE IT ON. Unless you are running a very slow machine.

 

[ssanches]

Originally posted by: andrey

.....Large enough for me to disable it. I've always hated system restore.

I'm just really curious how exactly you're measuring that performance hit and what exactly you're doing where you seeing that performance hit? I'm not really sure if you're aware or not, but System Restore isn't working 24/7, it is only activated when you boot up or when you install new programs or drivers.

Yes, I'm quite aware that it's not activated all of the time. The most visible performance hits as you mentioned are at startups/shutdown, installing softwares, drivers and when changing settings, where you can actually count the difference in seconds. Also when I disabled system restore, I managed to free up considerable RAM. IIRC the PF usage reported by Task Manager on my machine was around 95MB+, which was reduced to approx <75MB or so...(I can't recollect the exact figures, it may be more or less). I configure the OS and the applications on my system to be very lean, even though I have an Athlon XP 1600+, 512MB RAM installed, and a 7200rpm HDD. And earlier when I had 256MB RAM and System restore on for a few weeks, there was a discernable "lag" in quite a few things that I did, so as to cause a distraction. You can even feel system restore on things like changing your "desktop properties" settings, etc. In fact it kicks in for nearly all settings that you change, either directly, or indirectly, say thru an application.

For the average AT member, System restore isn't "needed" beause the resources saved can be used to improve over performance and most of the things that cause system failures like installing drivers to upgrading software are much safer in Win XP. For example, you have the facility to roll-back drivers. And modern installers are pretty capable themselves too. XP by itself is a very robust OS. IMHO system restore is meant for users who have a pesky sibling at home who loves to change settings and delete critical files without knowing the consequences or for novices, not for power users who want to maximize the performance of their system.

On systems with 128-192MB RAM, most users will definitely see a discernable performance increase. Another point to be noted is that most websites that benchmark hardware / software disable system restore before they do any sort of testing for performance reasons, even though most of the test beds feature >1400Mhz CPU's, 256MB+ RAM and 7200rpm HDD's.