A couple of tips about your motherboard. USB 3.0 port can be used with
Macrium Reflect on a "Fast" SSD/USB Flash stick like this
Corsair to backup and restore the entire OS drive in a very small number of minutes.
Backup and Restore is under valued for recovering to a "known" good state of your hardware and device drivers, and or the applications installed. The System Restore feature only handles a small subset of the "known to Microsoft" device drivers and branches of the registry.. (
not) the entire system.. System Restore (
will fail) to restore a system to an actually usable ATI AIW system.
I can't count the number of times that I didn't backup to tape, or make a mirrored hard drive.. just because it would take so long.. but bare metal image recovery with "Macrium Reflect Free" is simple and fast. You install it, download the Macrium bootable media stuff ~ 600 MB, and format that USB stick with the recovery media. Then boot off that stick and run the tool to (image) your hard drive.. and store it to the stick. SSD flash drives have a complete hard drive controller on the USB connection.. so they are immensely faster than "dumb" flash, they are first class hard drives on a stick. Once you have that image do whatever.. make a blunder.. then restore from that bootable stick to exactly the way your system was a few hours before.
Backup images are "used sector only" so regardless of how large the system drive is.. you'll have lots of space left over to take another and another.. version them by date and time, and some clever note about why you made them.. [02-20-2019 Before Trying Driver XX].
Undoing things once you've installed a driver, or blown away a sound card driver. swapped video cards.. is near impossible.. no.. (
it is impossible). Microsoft uninstall was designed for "Microsoft products" for use by "Microsoft products".. it doesn't watch what a Third Party application or driver does when its installing.. uninstallers are written by the software vendor as a poor after thought at the tail end of a project.. with no testing.. don't trust them.. (ever).
Bonus tips
1. Don't even think you won't need to restore to your earliest image, trust me.. it will just happen. Restoring with Reflect is a whole lot faster than taking hours, and then reactivating.. we are talking on average 3-5 minutes and your back up and running versus 1.5-2 hours.. and you don't even know (if) you did everything the same "way" and didn't make a mistake. Writing it all down is impossible.. eliminating human error is impossible. get it right once, and backstop.. ratchet yourself forwards. Build on your successes.
2. Don't even think about a cheaper silly, flimsy USB stick.. the slow ones.. will be intolerable.. your motherboard has USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, learn them.. use only the USB 3.0 ports.. make sure your using them at USB 3.0 speed.. check the BIOS and don't run them in compatible or USB 2.0 emulation mode. Make sure when you make your Macrium Reflect bootable stick.. you have the USB 3.0 drivers installed.. (if you don't) your stick will boot at USB 2.0 speeds. Always use the
same USB 3.0 port for booting.. don't stick it at the end of a USB cable, or USB hub.. and usually the one your want to use is on the back of the motherboard not on the front of the chassis. The solid "metal" case of the Corsair is worth it.. it dissipates heat and its guaranteed for 5 years.. unheard of in flash land.
3. USB 3.0 ports will "Blue Screen" your system if you jerk a connection out of the port without using the systray applet.. and even then it might. USB 3.0 is ultra-high-speed but USB 3.0 speed under XP was fringe tech.. from within or while your in XP.. the USB 2.0 ports are safer to use.. stay away from the USB 3.0 ports and only use those as a last resort, or for making the macrium bootable usb disk.
