If you are anything like me you are always trying new things with your computer, this utility, that game, or some new piece of hardware. I have found all too often that things don’t always work the way they were intended. A conflict between competing programs, or hardware competing for system resources can cause at least an unstable system, or a complete crash. Power Quest has a program they say can help you recover from these problems with Second Chance.

With Second Chance installed you will be able to reset your system to a time when things were working properly. Once the program is installed it will automatically save an image of your system settings and track files and directories that are deleted or changed. Second Chance works with each fixed drive or partition in your system. It doesn’t save removable drives like floppies or zips. Second Chance also ignores some directories such as Temp or Internet cache files. The individual checkpoints are not very large in size. The initial checkpoint I created on my machine was just under 6 megs in size for the 2 gigs of data I have on my machine.

Second Chance calls the saved files a Checkpoint. Checkpoints can be set up to save at a specific time of day from once a day to once a week, or they can be done manually. If you really screwed things up and can’t even get into Windows, there is also an option to create a start up disk. This disk opens its own operating system and gives you the ability to recreate your system from a stored checkpoint. The number of checkpoints you can create is controlled by variables you set yourself. The checkpoints can be saved for one day to fourteen days depending on your preferences. The total size of your checkpoints can also be controlled by setting a maximum disk size for the checkpoints, and setting a minimum free space on your disk drive. This allows a great deal of flexibility when adding or uninstalling files. Second Chance deletes the oldest checkpoints first when their time limit expires or when the minimum free space on the target drive is reached. Second chance will even ignore the maximum disk size as long as the minimum free space is available on your drive. This allows you to add or delete even the largest programs and not have to worry about losing your checkpoints.

When launching Second Chance, an Explorer type window pops up with three different view panels. A large vertical panel on the left of the screen lists the folders for the current checkpoint you’re viewing. A second panel on the top right shows a list of the recoverable files in the selected directories. The bottom right window shows which files are new or changed. The file and directory entries are color coded so you can easily see which ones were added, deleted, or somehow modified. To go back to a previous system setting, you highlight the checkpoint and click the restore button, just that simple. The system will reboot and a prompt will ask if you want to reinstall any file that is after your previous checkpoint. This works well if you have done several things since you started experiencing problems and didn’t want to undo all of them.

When I first received Second Chance for this review I figured on trying it out by adding and removing a few programs, maybe a few JPGs, or text files too. Then I would see how well it recognized my system changes. But I had the unfortunate opportunity to try Second Chance out on a real world system failure. As I said before, I like to play around inside my machine. This means I’m more prone to major crashes than most people. I try to back up my system files on a regular basis for the inevitable system crash, and I was doing just that last month when my power supply died right in the middle of my backup. Not only did I lose my backup, but the system files that were being read were toasted, too. I could no longer get Windows to even attempt to boot into safe mode. Armed with my Second Chance boot disk I was able to restore my system files from a checkpoint I had created when I first installed Second Chance. Now I could get back into Windows. From there I rebuilt the corrupted or missing VXD files that Windows insisted were no longer present. By opening the Second Chance window and viewing the different checkpoints, I was able to locate various missing system files that didn’t load the first time. I was able to get my system up and running, including all the add on programs I use, in less time then it normally takes to just reinstall Windows.

As far as most utility programs are concerned, we see a lot of things on the market that try to be all things to all people. Most of the times they do one or two things well but fall short with the rest of their included tools. Power Quest does a remarkable job of producing powerful tools that function just the way you would need them to. Second Chance worked just as the manual said it would, and I could not be happier with the way things worked out for me. If you would like a quick easy way to protect your computer from corruption but don’t do regular backups, I would whole-heartedly recommend picking up a copy of Second Chance.

PowerQuest at http://www.powerquest.com/. SecondChance at http://www.powerquest.com/secondchance/index.html.   u