Just had a new hard drive fitted and bought a USB bluetooth dongle from the shop too. The downloaded utilities for the dongle knocked out my on board audio so had to system restore which I thought wouldn't be a problem but the System Restore DELETED ALL my newly installed programs including Photoshop, Thunderbird, Firefox as well as all my customized Windows settings Very surprised. And very worrying.
The restore point was the day after getting the machine from the repair shop.
Has the copy of Windows at the repair shop not been installed properly??
Were the programs installed after the restore point? If so their Registry entries will have been wiped so they have (effectively) been uninstalled although the files are probably still there. If that's the case, just reinstall thm. And create another restore point after you have installed everything. The same goes for customizations made after the restore point. The whole point of a System Restore is to restore the system to the state it was in when the restore point was created. If it didn't delete, or disable, things then whatever was causing the problem in the first place would still be there, wouldn't it.
Yes the restore point was made to before the installing programs but I have never seen this before - it deleted all record of them, even the printer driver and software. It put Windows back as though it had just been installed fresh, with Outlook Express + IE etc, all in the start menu with big icons etc etc.
It isn't supposed to do any of this.
You restored to a point BEFORE you had the software installed. Just undo the restore & fix your problem the right way...reinstall the audio drivers. "It isn't supposed to do any of this"
If you restored to a point BEFORE everything was installed, that IS what happens.
"It isn't supposed to do any of this." Oh yes it is. Do you expect it to guess which things you want uninstalled and which ones you want to keep?
lol... ok yeah i forgot about undoing it...been that long. thanks guys....!