I reinstalled WINDOWS XP Media Center Edition on a computer not too long ago.  I noticed that after the installation, there were several restore points available, going back a ways.

Are these stored in a separate partition that Dell sets up at the factory, or what ?

I know dell has recovery partitions on some COMPUTERS..SYSTEM Restore Points (created by System Restore) are stored in the System VOLUME Information folders on each drive. The folders are hidden by default.OK, thanks for that...  I did notice an extra (small) partition on the hard drive after I did the installation.  That must be where the restore points are coming from..      Hi,
   The drive you are talking about might be recovery partition (Do not delete anything from it). But you can have restore monitoring ACTIVE on any drive or all drives. As you use system it automatically creates new restore points for future use, however you can manually create CheckPoints. So as the restore monitoring is seperately active on every drive, checkpoints obviously will be stored on each drive seperately.

Hope I could expain you it.Ummmmm he's gone.