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System Restore is a useful tool that you can use to reset your computer’s settings to an earlier time. It can be very helpful in times of crisis, when your computer fails to work as it should. However, you can only restore your computer’s settings if you have a valid restore point to set it back to.

Although your computer usually automatically creates a restore point every time you install new software, drivers or updates, there’s no guarantee that it will. It’s wise to create a manual restore point before you major changes to your computer’s settings, install software or manually edit the registry.

If turn System Protection off on a disk, all your restore points for that disk will be deleted. If System Restore fails to automatically create a restore point when you turn it back on, you should create a manual restore point. To use System Restore in Windows Vista, you must have about 300 MB of free space on your hard drive.

Your drive must be larger than 1 GB and must be formatted using the NTFS file system, as System Restore cannot protect FAT32 or FAT file systems. System restore restores important files and settings such as system files, installed programs and registry settings. It doesn’t change your personal user files, such as documents, email messages or pictures, stored on your computer.

Creating a System Restore Point on a Disk

Click the Start button, then right click Computer and select Properties. In the left pane, click System Protection.

Under Automatic restore points select the drive for which you’d like to create a restore point. Beside You can create a restore point right now for the disks selected above, click Create.

Type a description of the restore point in the field provided. You can use today’s date, or you can type a description of the changes you’re about to make to your computer. For example, describe the software you’re about to install or the edits you’re going to make to the registry. If it works, you will receive a message that the Restore point has been created successfully.

Restoring Your Manual Restore Point

Save your work and close all open programs. Click the Start Search box, type System Restore and press Enter. Click Next, then look in the window for your restore point. Your most recent restore point will appear.

Select it and click Next. Review the information under Confirm your restore point and click Finish. System Restore will now restart your computer to return it to the earlier state you chose.

For more information, read How to enable or disable System Restore in Vista.

If your children will be using your Windows Vista computer, you can protect them by using Parental Controls. Windows Vista Parental Controls can control which websites your children can access, what games they can play, when they can use the computer and which programs they can run.

To effectively set up Parental Controls for a child’s account in Windows Vista, you must first protect your administrator accounts with a password. Click the Start button and Control Panel. Under User Accounts and Family Safety, click Add or remove user accounts.

Click the icon for each administrator account on your Windows Vista computer. Select Create a password. Type a strong password of with at least 8 characters which consists of both letters and numbers. Then type a hint that will help you remember your password if you forget it. Click Create password.

Click User Accounts and Family Safety in the address bar. If your child doesn’t already have an account on your Windows Vista computer, select Add or remove user accounts, then click Create a new account. Type a name for the child’s account. Select Standard account as the account type and click Create account.

Click Manage Accounts in the address bar and select Set up Parental Controls. Select your child’s account from the list.

Under Parental Controls, click On, enforce current settings. Under Activity Reporting, ensure that On, collect information about computer usage is checked.

Click Windows Vista Web Restrictions. In this screen, you can choose to block certain websites and content or to allow all websites and content. You may also click the Edit the allow and block list link to allow or block specific websites.

If you’re setting up the computer for a younger child or if your child has a tendency to visit inappropriate websites, check the box beside Only allow websites that are on the allow list. Otherwise, choose a web restriction level for the Parental Controls under Block web content automatically.

The High web restriction level will block all websites except those which are specifically approved for children. The Medium web restriction level blocks unrateable web content and other content that is inappropriate for children, such as mature content. You may also choose to block web downloads by checking the next box. Click OK.

Click Time Limits, then click and drag your mouse over the hours when your child should not use the Windows Vista computer. The blocks in the graph should turn blue. Make sure to block all hours before 8 or 9 am and all hours after 8 or 9 pm.

If you prefer, you can choose to block your child’s access to the Windows Vista computer at other times, such as during breakfast, lunch or dinner or during times when you or another adult will need the computer.

If the child is on the computer when a blocked hour begins, he or she will be automatically logged off of the computer. When you’re satisfied with the Time Restrictions, click OK.

Click Games to set game restrictions. Game ratings only controls games which are installed on the computer, and cannot block or allow online games. Select Yes if you would like to allow the child to play games on your computer. If not, choose No.

If you’ve chosen Yes, click Set game ratings to choose which games the child can play. Choose whether you’d like to block or allow unrated games. Select Early Childhood for younger children. Select Everyone for children under 10 years of age. Choose Everyone 10+ for children between the ages of 10 and 13.

If you don’t mind your child being exposed to some strong language or violence, you may choose Teen for teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17. However, if these things concern you, you may select Everyone 10+ for your teenaged children instead. Click OK to enable your game ratings choice. Click Block or Allow for specific games.

If you’ve chosen to block unrated games, you may allow certain unrated games in this section. Also, if you’ve chosen Everyone 10+ or Teen as your game rating selection, you may block specific games which have violence, language and suggestive themes which you don’t want your child to observe.

The specific games which are currently installed on your computer will appear in this window. Go over each game individually, view its rating and select whether you want to block it, allow it or use the user rating setting you set in the Game Ratings parental controls.

If you’re uncertain whether a specific game is appropriate for children, consider playing it for a few minutes to determine whether you should block it or allow it. When you’re satisfied with your selections, click OK.

Click Allow and Block Specific Programs. If you want to allow your child to use all programs, select User can use all programs. If you want to block programs from running, select User can only use the programs I allow.

Wait for the computer to scan the Program Files folder, then select the allowed programs from the list. If a program is missing, click the Browse button to add it. When you’re finished, click OK.

You can get more information on this topic at How to block Internet web sites with free parental control software.

It can be extremely annoying when you’re looking away from your screen, typing away, then look to realize it’s all in CAPS. You accidentally hit the Caps Lock Key…here is how to make it beep when you hit it so you have a warning.

In Vista & Windows 7

1. To make the Caps Lock key beep and alert you if it’s accidentally hit in Vista or Windows 7, click on Start >> Control Panel.

2. In Control Panel set the view to show Large Icons, then click Ease of Access Center.

3. When the Make your computer easier to use screen comes up, you might be surprised when the computer starts talking to you. If you want to turn that off, uncheck Always read this section aloud.

Then under the Explore all settings list click Make the keyboard easier to use.

4. Then in the next screen scroll down and check Turn on Toggle Keys – hear a tone when you press CAPS LOCK, NUM LOCK, or SCROLL LOCK. Then click OK and close out of Control Panel.

In Windows XP

1. The process is essentially the same in XP but things are named and laid out differently. Click on Start >> Control Panel.

2. When Control Panel opens make sure you’re in Classic View and click on Accessibility Options.

3. In the Accessibility Options window, make sure you’re under the Keyboard tab, then check Use ToggleKeys. Click OK then close out of Control Panel.

That’s it! Now any time you hit the Caps Lock key you will hear it beep. This trick can be very helpful when you’re busy and accidentally hit Caps Lock.

You may have drives showing in My Computer or Windows Explorer that you don’t use a lot, such as a USB flash drive or a network drive only used for backups, or a floppy drive. You can hide these drives in Windows 7 and Windows XP with a fairly simple change to the registry.

NOTE: We recommend that you backup the registry before making changes to it. Refer to the following posts for help in backing up the registry.

• How to backup specific keys in the registry
• How to backup and restore the Windows Registry
• Backup the Windows Registry with RegBak

Hiding drives using this method only hides the drive from view. Applications and the command prompt will still be able to access it and you can manually access it by typing a path to a folder on the drive in My Computer or Windows Explorer.

To hide one or more drives, open the Start menu and enter “regedit” (without the quotes) in the Search programs and files box. Press Enter when regedit.exe is listed in the results to open the Registry Editor. You may also click on the regedit.exe link.

NOTE: If you are using Windows XP, select Run from the Start menu to open the Run dialog box. Enter “regedit” (again, without the quotes) in the Open edit box and click OK.

If the User Account Control dialog box displays, click Yes to continue.

NOTE: You may not see this dialog box, depending on your User Account Control settings. See our post, Windows 7 – How to configure UAC (User Account Control), for more information.

The Registry Editor displays. Navigate to the following key in the tree in the left pane.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ Explorer

You need to create a new value, called NoDrives, under the Explorer key that most likely does not exist. To do this, select the Explorer key and right-click in the right pane. Select New | DWORD (32-bit) Value from the popup menu. Name the new value NoDrives.

Before assigning a value to the new DWORD value you created, you have to calculate what that value will be. The NoDrives value is a 32-bit number, with the bits arranged in reverse order for the letters that represent drives, a value of 1 for a letter hiding that drive. For example, we decided to hide the floppy drive, which is drive A: and a USB flash drive, that is drive E:. The bits for hiding these two drives would be arranged like the following table.

You would then convert the binary number 10001 (the bits between A and E in the table) to a decimal number. You can use the Calculator in Windows 7 or Windows XP to do this.

If you are using Windows 7, open the Calculator and select Programmer from the View menu.

On the right side of the Calculator, select the Bin radio button to turn on Binary mode.

Enter “10001” (without the quotes) and then select the Dec radio button.

The decimal value of 17 displays as the result. This is the value you will enter for the NoDrives value.

Before we get back to defining the NoDrives value in the registry, we will show you how to convert the binary value “10001” to a decimal value in the Calculator in Windows XP. It’s a little different.

Open the Calculator and select Scientific from the View menu.

At top, left of the Calculator, under the entry box, select the Bin radio button to turn on Binary mode.

Enter “10001” (without the quotes) and then select the Dec radio button.

The decimal value of 17 displays as the result. Again, this is the value you will enter for the NoDrives value.

To enter the value for NoDrives, double-click on the NoDrives value in the right pane in the Registry Editor.

The Edit DWORD (32-bit) Value dialog box displays. First, select the Decimal radio button in the Base box. Then, enter “17” in the Value data edit box. Click OK.

NOTE: If you are hiding different drives and have calculated a different value for NoDrives, enter that value in the Value data edit box.

The value you entered displays in the Data column, along with the hexadecimal value, which, in our case, is 0×11.

To close the Registry Editor, select Exit from the File menu.

To put these changes into effect, you need to restart explorer.exe. We have previously written about the safe way to do this in Windows 7, Vista, and XP. See our post, Restart the Explorer.exe Process Correctly in Windows.

If you want to hide one drive, the following chart is a quick reference, showing you the Decimal and Hexadecimal values for commonly used drive letters.

To hide multiple drives, use the table of all the drive letters shown earlier in this post to figure out the correct binary code, and then convert that to decimal or hexadecimal using the calculator methods also discussed earlier.

To show the drives again, simply open the Registry Editor again and delete the NoDrives value you added.