So what you are saying is that all the times you have tried to use it, it has never worked? What kind of things were you trying to do? A lot of third party software can interfere with system restore, and to be quite honest, it is kind of old/outdated. If you are looking at something that works similar to it, you could look into Rollback Rx. It is like Windows system restore but functions better because it works outside of Windows. There's even a free version of it you can test out if that is what you are looking for.