any computer gurus around

[Kangum]

I bought a laptop that had vista on it. it did not come with xp drivers. so i spent all day hunting down xp drivers so i can install it. fast forward many hours later. xp is installed. sound is working. net is working. video drivers updated. now that everything is working how to i keep it that way.

what i mean is i dont want to have to go through all that again should i need to restore. is there a way or a program that will make me able to make a restore disk like the oem companies. what is a good one to use.


any help would be appreciated.

[AtomSmasher]

I've used Norton Ghost in the past to back up an entire disk image, so a reinstall of windows just means restoring that image.

[Kangum]

ok i will try that one thanks. hopefully its not to complicated.

[testicle187]

http://www.driver-soft.com/

Driver Genius works great for backing up all your current drivers on a system.  You can get the 15 day trial from the link.  I use it at work and have had no problems with.  Just run it and then save the output driver folders.

[dislikedword]

I would also check out acronis. They have many different products to create an image of your hard drive.

[Kangum]

norton ghost was like 80 bucks and acronis true image was 50, so i bought the acronis from amazon since it was cheaper. thanks all for your help.

hopefully they work as good as thier sales pitch.

[tk_42_1]

A free alternative is Clonezilla.  I don't know how competent  you are with PC's but I've used this program many times and works just as good as Ghost.  You can even create a disk that includes an image, but that that's a bit of work to create.

[Kangum]

I wanted to save my xp install so I made an image of my drive this afternoon with acronis. it was really easy.

to test it out i put vista back on the laptop. then rebooted with the acronis disk. i hit restore and it restored my system back to xp in i kid not 10 minutes. it was exactly the way it was.

some might say yea so what but that is the really amazing to me.  to switch from vista back to xp in 10 minutes. i dont know how i went so many years without drive image software. really awesome and strongly recomended.

[CheffoJeffo]

 

I would have recommended Ghost, mostly because it is what I have always used, but nice to hear of your success with Acronis.

[Jdurg]

Yeah, whenever I build a system I'll install the OS, tweak it to how I want it, then install all the programs that I know I will always use.  Once that is done, I make a complete duplicate image of the hard drive and burn it on a few DVDs and have that ready as a back up in case I ever need to restore the hard drive to like new condition.  The nice thing about the complete duplication is that all activations are already all set and I don't have to worry about anything else.

[knave]

Ghost is a great program. I've sworn by it for many years.  For anyone interested I found an older version of symantec systemworks (with ghost) for around $15 a few years back. Not sure if systemworks still has ghost bundled but it did in 2003.