Hi,
I have heard that there is a very rapid way to restore your windows settings including all your installed programs settings, should windows become curropted.
A backup image of system drive is required. A partition of the c drive is required for wnindows, all programs and all user settings.
A larger partition is required for your documents folder.

Does anyone know what program to use and how to do this?

It is supier to the system restore function.

Bye.

If you want to partition your drive with C:\ for Windows and programs and D:\ for data, then you would usually format the whole drive and set it up in this way from the beginning.

Your 'My Documents' folder can be redirected to any other folder or local hard drive partition by right-clicking it and selecting 'Properties' and then 'Move'.

There are various programs for creating a "snapshot" image of your C:\ drive. My personal favourite is Norton Ghost but there are lots of others, some freeware/trialware. You could Google for "drive imaging software" and I'm sure that would show you plenty of choices.

Once you've taken a drive image, you save it off of the PC, e.g. on a CD or DVD. Then, when your C:\ drive gets totally stuffed one day and you find that your PC doesn't work properly, you simply use the drive recovery software to restore the image from the CD or DVD. This restores the PC's Windows install and all applications to exactly the state that they were in on the day you took the image. Your data remains in tact and does not need to be recovered because it is stored separately on the D:\ drive, which does not get affected by a corrupted Windows install.

Bear in mind, however, that if you have a hardware failure and cannot access or use the hard disk, you lose EVERYTHING on the C:\ drive and D:\ drive. You still need to take regular backups of your data from the D:\ drive.

Some versions of Windows Vista have the above functionality included.

Incidentally, Windows XP's built-in System Restore feature is rubbish. I've tried it about 20 times and I've only seen it work once. Don't rely on it!

It should be noted that System Restore was never meant as drive recovery program. It is more of a Windows configuration tracker - keeping track of registry edits and hardware driver changes. I have used System Restore dozens of times with great success. Not always, however. Generally, System Restore is best used to roll back very recent changes. For example, if you install a new security application or piece of hardware and it messes up your system. System Restore is great at taking your system back a day or two. But if you hard drive becomes corrupt, System Restore is not the tool to fix it.

See the Microsoft TechNet article, FAQs Regarding System Restore in XP - in particular, scroll down to the answer to "What is or is not restored on my computer when I use System Restore?"

I agree that Ghost is a popular imaging program. If, like me, Symantec is not one of your favorite companies, Acronis True Image is another popular program. Both programs can save images to another drive (local [internal or external] or networked), partition, or optical disk(s). The advantage of using external drives or optical disks is you can store the disks offsite - necessary for fire, floods, or badguys hauling your computer away.

Personally, I use several methods of backup. My first line of defense is RAID1 - mirrored drives. I have two identical drives in a RAID array that act as a single drive. Everything saved to one is saved to the second automatically. If one drive fails, the system carries on without skipping a beat, or should I say bit. I get yelled at by the RAID monitoring program and all I have to do is remove the bad drive and slap in a new drive. They automatically sync up and I have an instant backup again. In fact, I periodically intentionally swap drives and keep the third off-site in my bank safety deposit box. Of course, is Mother Nature decides to take out my whole computer, I'm hosed - or least as far back as the time stamp of the drive at the bank. So I also keep backups of my critical data on networked drives.