Imaging Software

Lee_Howden

I'm having awful trouble my desktop PC at home. It's taking at least 15mins to settle down after logging in so that it can be used efficiently.

To remedy this I'm looking to completely reinstall the o/s and software. It has been suggested to me that once this is complete, before I start to use it I should make an image of the hard disk, making it easy to revert back to the fresh install.

One package that has been suggested for use is Norton Ghost. Can anyone recommend/dissuade me from using any others?

toastydave

if you have a seagate drive you can use diskwizard from https://www.seagate.com for free

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

its a rebaged version of acronis true image, which IMHO is the best you can buy at the moment

http://www.acronis.co.uk/

Oblivion

Lee_Howden wrote: »

I'm having awful trouble my desktop PC at home. It's taking at least 15mins to settle down after logging in so that it can be used efficiently.

To remedy this I'm looking to completely reinstall the o/s and software. It has been suggested to me that once this is complete, before I start to use it I should make an image of the hard disk, making it easy to revert back to the fresh install.

One package that has been suggested for use is Norton Ghost. Can anyone recommend/dissuade me from using any others?

I've been using Norton Ghost since 2003, in fact I'm still using the original version, and I take regular images of my C drive and write them to a second D drive in the computer. Then I copy that image from the D drive to an external LaCie USB hard drive just for extra peace of mind.

This simple tactic has saved my bacon on two occasions when a C drive failed, and I'm very happy with Ghost.

Two points ...

1) For some reason I could never get to the bottom of, I was never able to get Ghost to copy the C drive direct to an external USB drive, it would appear to start ok and then crash, so I have always used the internal D drive to do it. This may just be down to my stupidity in not understanding how to get the USB drivers installed correctly for the Ghost software.

2) Remember to keep a note of how your C drive is formatted. For example, mine has two partitions ... a 16Mb FAT partition followed by the main 149Gb NTFS partition. If you ever have to replace your C drive, you will first have to format the new drive in exactly the same way before attempting to write your Ghost image to it.
You can find out how your drive is partitioned by going into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.

HTH

Dave.

thomas01155

How old is your computer and what os are you using?
This may help you speed up your computer.
Scanning for spyware
Spybot
http://www.filehippo.com/download_spybot_search_destroy/3739/
Ad-Aware
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ad-aware/
SuperAntiSpyware
http://www.filehippo.com/download_superantispyware/

If you don't have a anti-virus installed choose one of these
AntiVir
http://www.filehippo.com/download_antivir/
Avast
http://www.filehippo.com/download_avast_antivirus/
AVG
http://www.filehippo.com/download_avg_antivirus/

Also remove things you dont need from start up Start>run>then type msconfig and press ok and go along to startup. Also run ccleaner
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

f1charlie

toastydave wrote: »

if you have a seagate drive you can use diskwizard from www.seagate.com for free

http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard

its a rebaged version of acronis true image, which IMHO is the best you can buy at the moment

http://www.acronis.co.uk/

Or a Maxtor, the same thing rebadged as Maxblast.