How do I reset Mountain Lion to an earlier state? I'm looking for a PC-style restore point.

I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mountain Lion about a week ago. Soon after, I noticed a problem with Zinio Reader (I could not view my magazines any longer). I found instructions on Zinio's Web site to remove the reader and Adobe Air, then re-download and install the reader. Things seemed to go smoothly for a short while, but then my MacBook slowed to a crawl. It takes about five minutes just to log into my machine. I'm getting a lot of the beach ball action. Every action—even resizing a window—has become an agonizing chore. So now I'm looking for a way to set my machine back to an earlier state—something like Windows restore points.

To answer your Carbonite vs Time Machine (you should probably ask this in a new thread .)
I prefer Time Machine because it backs my system preferences, user account (if you have more than one), apps, and files.  It's also fast to restore.  4 hours max from reinstall of my osx (from Leopard to Lion) to Time Machine Restore.
Carbonite just back up your files.
I tried the free version of Carbonite once (5 gigs of storage), and didn't like it.
I also know people have a hard time restoring from Carbonite because it is so slow.  You should probably test that out sometimes. 
One last problem I have with Carbonite is that if you delete a file on your mac, it will be deteled on the Carbonite within 7 day (something like that).  With Time Machine, as long as the drive is big enough, the file will be there (until the drive is full, than the oldest Time Machine backup will be deleted).
The advantage of Carbonite is that the files are not in your house.

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