re: XP home backup utility?
Saturday, February 5, 2005 at 7:23 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Matthew D. Healy
(1255 messages posted)
This is one of many good reasons to get a no-name
"white box" computer from a local store: it will
usually come with a full XP OEM Version installation
CD. It is also much less likely than some of the name
brands to require special hardware drivers and such.
Mine needs very few drivers beyond what comes
with XP by default.
Since the components of such a box will typically
have come from a number of different sources,
you can also be confident they will play nice when
you replace failed components or upgrade to newer
ones. Some mass-market systems nowadays
don't even come with any CD,
there's a hidden partition on the hard disk from which
an OS restore can be done. But what if the hard disk
dies, or you want to upgrade?
On my no-name box, when I got a new (bigger
and faster) hard drive, I simply did a full backup of
the old drive, then restored onto the new hard
drive and was off and running with all my software
configuration unchanged.
The mass-market vendors assume the user will
do very little customization, mostly running the
bundled software that came with the computer
plus maybe a few additional mass-market apps.
So the user is expected to burn document files
to CD. Then in the event of a crash, the support
tech will walk the user through using the OEM
restore CD to reformat and reinstall the OS and
bundled software just as shipped. Then the user
reinstalls any other applications, and they're done.
But for those of us who have spent many many
hours tweaking our systems to meet our needs,
this is not acceptable.
That's where programs like Drive Image or Acronis
True Image or Ghost or whatever shine!
On Wednesday, December 4, 2002 at 9:31 am, Alex Chapman wrote:
>One caveat that I so unfortunately discovered is that many of the "pre-installed"
>Windows XP packages that are sold with new computers are a special OEM version that
>almost always does not include Windows XP disks and therefore, no backup utility.
>I purchased an e-Machines PC in Dec 2001 and after having to restore the entire
system
>twice due to crashes and inability to boot at all, I tried to install the backup
>utility and was chagrined to find out it is not included. I don't think this is
>specific to eMachines but I was extremely disappointed to discover that I will either
>have to purchase a retail version of XP or, as previous posts suggested, a different
>backup utility.
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