Bash A Little Less

In my last post about the Task Scheduler and System Restore in Vista, I speculated a bit about changing the scheduling for System Restore as a way to reduce the amount of disk-bashing that takes place when I fire up my notebook.

Here's how I theorized it: Most of the time, I only use my notebook for a few minutes a day -- for instance, to write a blog post somewhere before going to sleep.  This means that almost every time I fire up the computer, the Task Scheduler activates a belated task to create a System Restore point, and I see a lot of disk activity.  Since I don't use the machine that often and keep any data on it backed up elsewhere, having System Restore run nightly isn't as important.  I don't want to turn System Restore off completely, just have it run less frequently.

To that end, I edited the schedule for System Restore to run once a week -- on Monday night -- and the end result is far less disk-bashing whenever I sit down with it at night.  Here's how to do it.

1. Open the Task Scheduler (UAC), and navigate in the left-hand pane to Task Scheduler Library | Microsoft | Windows | SystemRestore.

2. Double-click the task named SR to bring up its properties, and select the Triggers tab.

(Note: The disabled "On workstation unlock" task was one of the triggers I experimented with to see how well it worked.  You won't see such a thing in your own Vista install.)

3. Edit the Daily trigger.  I set it to run Weekly, on Monday, at 12:30 AM.

Obviously you can use any schedule you think is fitting of your computer's usage patterns.

4. Click OK to close all the dialog boxes.

I rebooted after this just to be safe (and to create a Restore Point anyway).  Obviously I don't recommend this for systems that are used a lot more regularly than my notebook -- I left my desktop system as-is, for instance -- but with a little judiciousness you can fine-tune the behavior to suit your usage habits.