Maggie, it's always better to have a system restore point or do what i do which is more effective, use an image utility like Acronis to make an image of your hard drive once you install windows.
Yes an image utility has the advantage of not being corruptable if you save it to a DVD or somewhere where it can't be accessed by malware. If your computer becomes corrupted with malware, system restore may be disabled or corrupted by the malware. System restore is better for accidental registry corruptions (like bad installs) than for malware which may be designed to infect system restore among other places.
acebook
witter
