Why System Restore Is Restricted To Your PC

I needed to convert some .3gp files to .MPEG and I’m at a loss coz I’m not a techie. A friend advised me to download a video file converter from the Internet. He said it is free. I searched and I noticed that most of them are not free while some say, “free to try, $29.95 to buy.” I don't want a trial version, so I searched using my Peer-to-Peer program and luckily, I found one. I downloaded and installed it and the next minute my wallpaper was replaced by a blue background with a notice that a Trojan software has hijacked my PC. Great. I began to think if it was any luck at all. Problems like these often involve editing the Windows Registry, which is not really my forte. Besides, there’s this one no-brainer solution: System Restore*. In a nutshell, System Restore... well… restores your system back to a specific date which are marked by Restore PointsJ. Just choose a restore Point, and Windows XP will undo all the changes made to your computer that was made after the date of the Restore Point. I restored it back to the day before I installed the program, and my computer woke up from its nightmare. No sweat.

At that point, I thought what if we have some sort of a “System Restore” function in our lives and we can undo our mistakes?

I thought of it for sometime and I think it would’ve been great. We all had our times when we will all give anything just to undo what we’ve done… where we want to slap ourselves on the face and hope we’ll wake up. But the knot in our stomach is a grinning notice that it is real, that it’s happening, and we screwed up big time. How handy it is if we have the gadget that auto-saves our lives and can shoot us back to anytime we want. Everything will be perfect, right?

On an illogical point, it will be perfect. We'll have things go your way, we’ll prevent unpleasant events, and we can even win the lotto a lot of times. Taking reality into consideration, it’s absolute chaos. Imagine a lot of people traveling back and forth through time, changing the course of events just for the sake of “making things right” for them.

Security is what this is all about. And it is what most people live and die for.

We love it when we know nothing can go wrong. We are afraid of taking chances. We are afraid of risks. We are more focused on living securely than living freely. We always play it safe, striving hard to do the right things. Logical or not, life is not a school where you always have to be right (damn I hate studying). Life is a playground where you can either win or lose, or start a brawl and get wounded in the process.

We don’t need a System Restore. Life is meant to be lived with mistakes and failures. They are like stones that are given to us not for the purpose of dragging us down, but as steps that we can build so we can climb up. They are given to us so we can learn, and take it as an opportunity to show everyone what we are made of. Mistakes and Failure are your professors in the University of Hard Knocks.

So just let System Restore be on Windows and welcome your mistakes. Life is all about not knowing what will happen next, and knowing that you are strong enough to take on whatever happens.

To end this, here a quotation from Helen Keller:

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing"



* For information on Win XP System Restore, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/systemrestore.mspx