The system restore point snapshot's are often one of the few tools at my disposal when folks bring in a virally (or more often lately, malware/scamware) infected system that they need my help to fix.
Not because the Microsoft system restore tool itself works most of the time (it doesn't), but because using a Linux Live boot I can usually get to untouched previous copies of the registry on a machine that otherwise isn't backed up any other way. (If anyone ever brings me a system that's screwed up that actually has anything like a backup, I'd probably faint...)
So turn it off if you want, but it (unlike much else in the Windows OS's) doesn't use resources other than just when it's saving a restore point (except disk space, of course), so it doesn't do much harm even if it never does you any good.
I'd advise against it, though - and certainly against it unless you are absolutely sure you are getting good backups to another media that INCLUDE a good backup of the registry unless of course you don't mind a periodic complete reload. Which I agree is one of the best way's to clean up problems (and often, the only one that works "completely").
But often time, when the rubber meets the road , system restore can buy you the time you need when something happens to get back into operation until you have the time to do a better fix. And frankly, while it's certainly kludgy, it's not any more of a kludge than the entire rest of the OS - and less so than much of it.
All IMO, of course.
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