For those who do not know, XP has a feature that allows you to create a system restore point. What this does is it enables you to reset or restore your OS back to the way it was when you created the restore point. For instance, if you created a restore point today, a week from now you could restore XP back to the way it is today. I found out tonight what a wonderful feature this is.

I had been doing research on the web for about three hours when one of the sites I hit gave we a very nasty Trojan, this thing royally F-ed my box up. The Trojan was eating up all my CPU and when I tried to shut down the processes (this thing had three processes going at once) they would immediately start right back up. My computer finely crashed, but luckily I got it (after several tries) to boot in safe mode, it wouldn’t boot in normal mode because of this Trojan. I ran two different anti-virus programs and 5 different spyware programs none of them would remove this thing.

After a couple of hours of unsuccessfully trying to remove this god-awful virus, I started prepping to reformat the drive when I remembered the system restore point. Luckily, every time I run Spybot (a spyware program) it automatically creates a new system restore point. Since I had ran Spybot yesterday I went back and restored the OS to yesterdays settings and everything was fine. It took about 15 minutes to do, my computer was back to normal and I didn’t lose any data.

I’ve had XP for about 3 years and have never encountered a Trojan that whacked out my box this bad nor have I ever had to use the restore point feature. So if you use XP you may want to look into this. You may never need it, but if you ever do it can definitely save you from a lot of heartache.