You didn’t say what Operating system you have but here is the general method if you don’t have installation disk. All Windows operating systems; XP, Vista, 7 and 8 have a partition on the Hard Drive that contains the “recovery” for that system.
The first thing you’ll want to do is backup all of your doc’s, pictures, down loads etc., if you’ve saved them along with anything else you want to keep.
(I save all of my larger down loads because it saves a lot of time if I have to recover programs I’ve installed that require updates and I have had to many times over the years, disk space available of course.)
After you’ve done that go to the Control panel.
There you should find a tab labeled “Recovery”. Click on it. It should ask if you want to do a Recovery or a System Restore.
Here you have a decision to make, restore or recover.
There is a difference; the “Recovery will restore your system to its original state but you lose all of the data IE…docs, pics, installed software, updates to the OS Etc. It’s like it came out of the box.
Note though that Microsoft is no longer supporting XP and updates are very questionable.
While System Restore will return you to an earlier point in your systems history but won’t erase your data or disturb any software you’ve installed. It should allow you to pick a particular point in time.
Say you’ve made some changes and something stop working. You can pick a point in time just prior to this event and restore all of your prior settings. I’ve used this and it does save a lot of time.
Another option I have used is to go to “FIX MY PC” On the Microsoft Web page, no charge. There you can them analyze your issue and fix a file or settings. I’ve also used this and it can save a whole lot of time.
I hope this helps.
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