When it comes to installing and uninstalling software, I’m rather paranoid.

Thankfully.

A few months ago I decided to uninstall a program that purports to keep your computer free of crud. It does so by working in the background, clearing crud before it becomes too cruddish. The idea is that your computer will start up quicker and run faster without your having to actually do anything.

What I found was the opposite. By constantly being on crud alert, this program slowed my computer down to a crawl. Because the program was running in the background, I took a while to work out what was going on. It showed up once I ran Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del).

I decided to get rid of the program altogether, because despite setting it to not start up in the background, every so often it does so anyway. Unfortunately — and this is really bizarre — when I uninstalled it, it removed all traces of Microsoft Office too.

Now, obviously I could have simply reinstated Office because it’s a legit installation and the original CDs are within arm’s reach. However, I didn’t have time, and I’d been meaning to upgrade to Microsoft 365 anyway. Therefore I ran System Restore which, as the name suggests, restores the system back to what it was before.

This is where my paranoia comes in, and why I’m grateful for it. Before I install or uninstall any software, especially applications which can (potentially) affect the whole system, I do the following:

1. Backup my data.

2. Create a Restore Point.

Where it’s more involved than that — such as, in this case, having to unsubscribe from a service too — I write myself a checklist. Here, for example, is my checklist for upgrading to Microsoft 365:

As you can see, I end up creating a system restore point four times. That may seem like overkill, but I’ve learnt from experience that little is more annoying than having to undo everything I’ve done over the last hour because of one small last minute glitch.

Although following this checklist is time-consuming, I like to think it will prove to be less time-consuming than inadvertently causing a major problem.