How to Disable System Restore in Windows 7?

System restore is a pretty useful feature which was implemented by Microsoft in their Windows operating system for restoring your whole system (OS) to a previous state (which is defined by application installations, etc as many knows). But I personally don't like this at all because it has drawbacks rather than useful ones (at least in my opinion).

First, it uses my valuable HDD space for which I cannot blame the OS. But most importantly, even after doing a system restoration, afterwards, you may not be able to uninstall applications (properly) as usual by using Control panel or uninstallers in the applications, etc. So in a way, even though it is certainly helpful (where you can restore your entire OS to a previous point without having to re-install it, etc) but I'd like to manually disable the System restore feature in MS Windows (7 in this case).

How to do that?

Pretty easy actually, just follow the on screen instructions.

1. First right-click on your "My Computer" icon and from the menu choose: "Properties".

2. From the next window, to your left, choose, "Advanced System Settings".

3. Now from the next window, choose the tab called "System Protection".

Once you click on that, you should see a window that shows you details such as current disk usage, the partitions that are being used, etc. Now choose a partition and under "Protection" if it says "On", then it means that Windows is using space on that drive for system restore feature.

4. Just click on a partition and simply click on the button called "Configure" and from the next window under "Restore Settings", choose "Turn off system protection".

5. Now click on the "Apply" button and then press "OK" to close the window.

If you have multiple partitions, then you'll have to manually disable them all using the same method. That's how you completely disable the "troublesome" (not always though :D) system restore feature in Microsoft Windows 7 (Vista instructions should also be similar).