Imaging product saves hours, $, hair color, adds to lifespan

[Sunflower]

Very early last Friday morning my computer had an accident during a boot-time defrag, I believe. Upon restarting I could no longer stay connected to the satellite network. Calls to techsupport resulted, eventually, in the information that the satellite my dish points toward was having issues and they were going to assume that was causing my problem.

That was Friday afternoon. Sunday night I return, same issue is still present. I call back, straight through to advanced support with my special PIN number, and a fellow tells me I have a bad TX. After finding out the closest technician is in either Minnesota or Illinois I decide to work the problem more myself.

Out comes the old Dell I use in emergencies. It connects fine. I call tech support back and ask, "don't you think there's a software issue with the first computer?"

He says, "no, that's an intermittent problem, it will come back, you should have your TX replaced."

"But, but, that just doesn't make any sense," I say, doing my best Johnny Cochoran.

I hung up and started dragging My Docs, skin folder and such to the D: partition and rebooted to get the F11 prompt for the recovery manager.

20 minutes later I'm sitting at my computer as it was 3 weeks ago and its connected to the satellite just fine.

I used Acronis True Image Home 9.0. This can be purchased from Newegg for 30 bucks. If your machine runs nicely right now and you've got 30 bucks you can spare this could pay for itself at any moment.

If I don't screw it up too badly, I think this means I don't have to reformat and reload windows again until this drive dies!

[B16Enk]

I too swear by imaging proggies.

I use ghost personally, as do several others here, but Acronis has a good rep too.

I'm on the verge of re-instating my clean build too soon, too much development stuff been loaded. Plus I need to de-couple all my controllers to suck some video down of our Tivo type box.