Hi,
One other option is to look at a third-party restore utility. My new (last fall) system came with Farstone’s Restore-IT already installed – that has the advantage that it creates daily incremental restore points for the whole drive, not just system files. So I never touch XP’s restore at all.
And there’s no conflict with System Restore – if I do need to restore to an earlier point, since the whole drive is “back-dated” that includes Win’s own restore-point files.
Since it came as part of my system package, I haven’t a clue what it would cost by itself, but that should be easy enough to find.
Best,
Mike