Disaster Prevention Tools

[radderfire]

I'd be interested to hear what tools people use to prevent any software problems from shutting down their PC. For example, recently I installed some new software which insisted that MSMXL, whatever that is, was installed from its CD, so I did that, and now IE7 keeps crashing. I haven't bothered reinstalling IE7 yet because I have so little faith in Vista Business at the moment so I could see something else going wrong.

So, how do you cope with these situations gracefully? I'm thinking of running everything in a virtual machine to avoid tedious reinstalls. Or what "step back" tools are available?

What tools and techniques would you recommend? Naturally I back my data up but it's recovering the system swiftly that I'm interested in.

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[AbsenceJam]

System Restore set to create restore points more often is the first line of defence, I don't know why so many people turn it off, it can help fix a lot of problems. On top of that I use Acronis True image to create a full backup every couple of days and incremental ones twice a day, so if System Restore fails or I want to mess about with no consequences I can restore my system to whenever I please. Acronis also has this Try & Decide function where it saves your system state and you can choose to keep changes or cancel them, but it doesn't work through reboots. - to be honest though it's easier to simply create a backup and then restore.