Vista System Restore -- how do I get it to run only once a week?

[Rivenshield]

I have Vista Premium Home Edition on a 2-month old Gateway, and am
reasonably well pleased with performance... have SuperReadyBoostFetch
and all that other hard-drive-thrashing crap turned off, and currently
have it set to create a fresh restore point every Sunday. Despite
this, I cannot for love or money keep System Restore from running
EVERY SINGLE TIME I get any sort of software patch or update. Windows
update? Firefox or Norton update? Scratch my arse? System Restore
cranks up, kidnaps my box for an hour and a half, and sits there
grinding away. Can't play games and even switching between songs in
Media Player becomes tiresomely slow.

Plus my HD is a particular model of Seagate that is *LOUD*. Sounds
like midgets munching granola in there, and it's just plain
irritating. And I'm sure this crap is stripping months off my hard
drive's lifespan. How on Earth do I turn it off, short of disabling
System Restore altogether? Is this just the price you pay for having
Vista?

 

[Gordon]

I have Vista Premium Home Edition on a 2-month old Gateway, and am
reasonably well pleased with performance... have SuperReadyBoostFetch
and all that other hard-drive-thrashing crap turned off, and currently
have it set to create a fresh restore point every Sunday. Despite
this, I cannot for love or money keep System Restore from running
EVERY SINGLE TIME I get any sort of software patch or update. Windows
update? Firefox or Norton update? Scratch my arse? System Restore
cranks up, kidnaps my box for an hour and a half, and sits there
grinding away. Can't play games and even switching between songs in
Media Player becomes tiresomely slow.

Two points. Firstly, System restore is meant to restore your system if an
UPDATE or something similar goes wrong, which is why it creates a SR point
when your system changes. Therefore there is NO point in creating a System
restore point every Sunday. It's not a backup, it's a get out of jail card.
Secondly, having turned off all the " SuperReadyBoostFetch and all that
other hard-drive-thrashing crap " (your words) is probably why it takes an
hour and a half to do the restore point. Vista is DESIGNED to work with
prefetch so turning it off, is a bit silly IMHO.
My system restore is set to the default setings and I don't even notice it's
working, so something YOU turned off has created YOUR problem.