The advantage of protecting your system in this way is software installs, setting changes or certain malware infections can be wiped away and the computer restored to a previous point in time.

Another option is using software that can completely discard any changes made to the operating system when you reboot. An alternative is to sandbox software installs so no changes are made to the system files.

While it’s useful, System Restore still has issues like being a bit unreliable and possibly including malware in the restore points. Windows has System Restore built in to help revert file and registry changes to an earlier point in time after software installs.