How to disable System Restore on some or all hard drives in XP

Member

By desolator144
User-Submitted Article

Article Rating: (36 Ratings)

Are you tired of XP wasting 12% of your hard drive space with system restore files? Do you have secondary hard drives that have no reason to be running system restore or saving useless restore files? Well the good news is it's really easy to turn off in Windows XP. Also, these instructions should be very similar to how you do it in Vista.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Step 1

Find the My Computer icon either on your desktop or start menu and right click on it. Then select Properties and it will bring up the System Properties window.
Step 2

One of the tabs on the top is System Restore. Click on it and it will show all the settings for all the hard drives you have installed.
Step 3

If you have multiple drives, you see a list of them with a "Settings" button next to it. Otherwise the options for your main drive will have come up right away. You probably want to leave System Restore on for your primary/system drive in case you install a bad driver or delete an important EXE or DLL file or something and need to restore your computer to an earlier date. If you do want to leave it on but don’t want it to waste so much space, select a drive from the list and click the Settings button to open the configuration window, or in single drive situations it will be open already. Either way, turn the slider control down to a much lower percentage than the default 12%.
Step 4

If you really do want to turn off System Restore completely for all hard drives, there's a checkbox at the top that says "Turn off System Restore on all drives." But if you only want to disable it for secondary drives that aren't the main system one, select them from the list and click Settings then check the box at the top that turns it off for just that one drive. I recommend you turn it off for any secondary drives since there's absolutely no reason for it to be running on them and it's just wasting space.