Incidental System Degradation
It used to be common to reinstall Windows every year or so. Once installed, Windows would inevitably start slowing down and become progressively slower and less stable. Now, while Windows 7 and Windows 8 might be more stable and less prone to incidental system degradation, it does still happen. With regular use — installing and uninstalling programs, adding and removing new drivers, moving data around, etc. — over time you’ll still find that your Windows installation taking a little longer to start up, run, perform tasks, and shut down.
Many poorly written applications stay resident in memory long after they were supposedly uninstalled. Vestiges of these zombie programs continue to load up with Windows and waste CPU, RAM, and harddisk resources. Is there some quick way to remove all these bloated processes from unnecessarily cluttering up your system and using up resources? In other words, how does one prevent incidental system degradation?
Ensuring a Streamlined Windows Installation
Once you’ve spent a day installing Windows and all your programs and tweaking all the settings just the way you like you, of course, don’t want all this painstaking effort to go to waste by an errant click. So is there some way of “locking-in” this perfect system configuration?
RollBack Rx is the perfect solution to maintain a perfectly configured system state and prevent incidental system degradation. Once RollBack is installed it will create a baseline configuration. This should be done on a clean Windows setup. If you need to install a new application, it’s recommended that you return to this clean configuration and make a new snapshot that includes this program. Returning to a clean snapshot is a quicker way to get a fresh Windows installation. Rather than removing a program, it’s better to return to a prior snapshot before the system was installed. This means that you will always get a consistent experience every time you start up Windows and prevent incidental system degradation.
The other alternative is to…
Regularly defrag your harddrive,
Troubleshoot the various issues as they pop up,
Maintain a clean Windows Start-up Services list,
Monitor Windows background processes,
Clean out your browsing cookies,
After uninstalling a program delete any possible remnants,
Make sure that no unnecessary drivers are loaded,
and on and on and on….
Most PC users can’t be bothered to learn and to take on this level of commitment.
The Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Sandbox to Test Software
To prevent incidental system degradation and get the best performance out of windows, rather than installing and uninstalling programs regularly, current best maintenance practices is to either test the new program being considered in a virtual box or to sandbox it.
RollBack Rx can be thought of as a sandbox. It allows you to trial new applications before installing them and potentially exposing your system to unwanted changes. By returning to an earlier snapshot, you can quickly undo whatever changes were made by the questionable game or other application. Rollback Rx protects you from program-installed disk drivers and root kits. It restores your harddrive on a bit-for-bit basis, giving you a much more robust recovery capability. If you choose instead to uninstall some program there may still be files left over and changes made to your configuration files and registry entries that remain. Only Rollback Rx quickly and completely restores your system back to any predefined configuration. This set configuration allows you to experiment with changes without potentially compromising your system set-up and subjecting it to incidental system degradation.
Return to Your System’s Perfect Settings
RollBack Rx is an automated self-cleaning regiment that returns the system back to a clean configuration on a fixed schedule, so you don’t have to remember to do it periodically. Setting up and managing multiple system configurations using Windows User Accounts is a lot of trouble. But instead of using Windows to lock-down the guest account and defining privileges — restricting them from Registry editor, Task Manager, Control Panel, et cetera — with RollBack Rx you can simply have one sysadmin account since no changes the users make will remain once they’ve ended their session. So let your users do what they like on your systems and simply return to a snapshot that was automatically created when they started up the machine.