It is incredibly easy. I use Norton Ghost 2003. It is nearly automated. I select my USB external hard drive to create the image on (after already saving my default settings for the image such as compression level, virtual memory to use, USB drivers to load,etc), and it shuts down to dos and loads a dos environment and runs the software to create the image. When finished, it reboots to windows and I only see a message if the image creation failed for any reason. To restore, I boot to a 3.5" floppy (which I created using Norton Ghost 2003) and it runs the dos ghost software. I locate the image i want to restore from the USB external hard drive ( I typically have a few images I've created to choose from) and it restores it and reboots the pc. It has worked great 3 times on my system so far. I also use it to create an image of my daughter's pc which doesn't get the antispyware and adware and antivirus software ran as often as it needs to be. I have restored my daughter's pc more times than I can count! I purchased it for my development machine because you know how long it takes to reinstall everything we use. I have never regretted it. It has more than paid for itself! :o)




>What do you use for ghosting? How does the backup/restore process work?
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>>One other comment - not to scare you or anything! My computer is just over a year old. It came with a great Western Digital Hard drive. very fast and silent. I never had any problems until about 3 weeks ago I started experiencing 'delays' periodically and a couple of times my computer just stopped responding. I went through the entire gamut to test it - ran thorough hard drive tests which reported no errors, memory tests, verified power settings, switched everything in CMOS and the OS to always on just for testing purposes and also did everything listed above. Even did a complete new install out of frustration. The next day my hard drive failed completely. Just after the 1 year warranty expired of course. I replaced it with a 5 year warrantied Seagate hard drive and reinstalled using my Ghost image and wouldn't you know it - it now runs fast again!