Image is everything

I was reading my Maximum PC magazine today and noticed a few tips for keeping your computer running in tip top shape. Maximum has a list of 30 things we should do, most of them the normal stuff I usually hear about but there are a few items that I haven’t heard before and I would like to mention a few of them this week.

The best one, in my eyes, is to “Image Your Drive”. I feel that this a great tip for it can save you a lot of time when you would like to reinstall everything on your drive. Power-users that are always tweaking their machines and/or installing and removing software will benefit from this greatly. When making so many changes to your machine, things tend to become a litlle unstable. Mainly due to the changes in drivers and things that don’t uninstall completely.

I have come into this situation several times and have spent many hours trying to get the system back to a working state. From now on, this will be my safety net. Maximum PC has listed a few software packages that are able to accomplish this feat. PowerQuest’s Drive Image 2002, Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image are all able to make an exact copy of your drive.

I will also use this for the machines I build. It seems that I could make a basic image and use that to install some of the common software I always install on a system. I’ll let you know how it all turns out.