Dell system recovery media icon
 

Hello guys,

I have had this laptop for a short while but something keeps on annoying me about it. The XPS laptop I have comes with some dell software to backup your data, but I have no clue on how it works. I will tell you first up that I have never owned a laptop before so all this is rather new to me in the first place.

But anyway, an icon keeps on appearing in the corner of my screen from the system recovery program. No words nothing, and if I open the program I see nothing but numbers and icons with not a single bit of explanation. So I have no idea on what it does and how it works. I can't right click the icon to hide it and if I go fullscreen it is pasted in front of everything.

Can anyone give me some insight on this as to what the menu does, what things mean and mostly where can I adjust the settings to get rid of that icon.

Picture in the tags related, the menu and the icon in the corner.

I read here and there that people uninstall it as there is a return to factory settings partition. I know I have one of those as well, some do recommend to create at least one back up on a usb or something but I don't even know how the program works.
Also how does it usually go to work if you restore something to factory settings, how does one do such a thing normally?

Here is the image I mentioned;

I am adding another picture to show you what the back up menu looks like. Normally it has the loading bar with the cancel button, it displays an error after being busy for a while but as you can see I can't see any normal text.

I tried uninstalling the program, rebooting, reinstalling it from the official dell site with the latest version and rebooting again but it looks exactly the same.

Is there any other back up software that I can use int his case?

Normally you'd get these kinds of programs nagging at you just after you start them up the first time, telling you that you need to create recovery media (it's mainly a backup in case the hard drive fails) although it looks like the program has been designed really poorly, but there does seem to be a settings (or something along those lines) icon (that cog icon in the top right near the minimise button) that might give you some more information (I only said might as I don't have a dell laptop, so I wouldn't completely know how any backup software works).

I'd probably guess that once you've created your own recovery media, it'll stop running on it's own.

I hear people mention that after making at least one they remove the program, I might just remove it myself because of the instability of the program itself.
I think I'll be alright with it not having made a back up since it is in case of hardware failure in this case the hdd or virus infections which I haven't had for years.
Besides if things do mess up badly then I'll def remove windows 8 and reinstall 7 since it is far more stable and a lot less unnecessary addons.

Are there possible alternative software choices that can make such a back up though?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronis_True_Image Acronis True Image. It makes a image of your current data all and saves it as a partition in your harddrive. You can try using the msconfig option and see what files you can disable. The first I'd normally do is get rid of all the crap data the laptop comes with. The fastest method would be to reinstall windows, but this voids your warranty. Well than again, anything software related isn't covered by warranty anyway.

Its the age of "Digital" media. Companies are too cheap to give you a disc with all the drivers. Instead they waste your harddrive with the so called "backup."

Other than the default windows option, whatever your computer comes with everything else usually costs money.

Best bet is to uninstall it (as judging from the screenshots, the utility must be buggy). Better off to just pick up Teracopy and use it to back up stuff to an external USB drive.