Windows System Restore

Is good for what it is meant to do. Be careful to turn it off to erase protected files if you discover malware on your computer. Although this will delete previous restore points, it will also get rid of viruses in those restore points.

Useful only in some situations.

Waste of disk space. If something borks up I'd rather reinstall Windows as a whole, instead of relying on Windows ME technology.

A lot of people say it's crap. Well, most of those are looking at the wrong part of it. System recovery wasn't meant to save you from viruses nor hard drive failure. System recovery is more meant to save your system from modifications, drivers, applications and such that might change critical parts of the operating system..

If that's where you got your problem from and you use system recovery - it'll most likely work. It's saved my ass several times and it is one of the most awesome pieces of Windows, because in the end it does its job.

Don't count on it heavily. Better off doing a full backup.

kind of useless as most recent virus used slack-space & system restore to hide from being detect by AV.