Still worth imaging?

[Dorkenstein]

I started a new install of Windows early in the year and meant to buy Acronis TrueImage to protect that clean perfect install to fall back on instead of having to restart after formatting. Well I didn't have the money for it and now it's six months later and I've been trying to keep it clean but things are piling up. Is it still worth imaging my windows partition for safety/falling back on? I don't have any viruses or spyware or anything but sometimes things screw up (not badly though). I'm looking for a tool like Macecraft's Powertools but a cheaper/free version so I can hose down my windows drive and then image it. Any opinions?

 

[Dorkenstein]

Anyone?

 

[Dorkenstein]

I'd greatly appreciate the advice.

 

[cmdrmoocow]

If a virus/trojan/ non-techie family member, etc total your hard drive ("You had all these unneeded files, I deleted them and now the machine won't start.", "Where?", "Ummm... C:\Windows. Is that bad?"), you will love the ability to restore your machine with a few clicks.

 

[Dorkenstein]

With which program? By the way, what's the best drive cleaning program? Is it:

1)Crap Cleaner
2) Clever Cleaner
3)Powertools
4)Easycleaner

Thanks for the reply.

 

[cmdrmoocow]

The best drive cleaner, honestly, is yourself. Second to that is probably Spring Cleaning by Aladdin (makes of stuffit), but I haven't used any cleaning software myself.

Edit: Back to the backup imaging that you were intending on, pick a sunday and do this:
1)Copy all your data to an external source; another partition, CD-R, DVD+R, network, etc
2)Completely Fdisk your hard drive (or your equivalent formatter of choice, even the Win2K/XP installer)
3)Set up your machine just exactly the way you want it to be, all drivers in, programs, files, cookies, etc.
4)Make an image of it
5)Lean back and relax that you can now get your system back to being 'fresh' at any time you need.

Norton Ghost is the most famous program for imaging, but I'm sure you can find others that do the job as well.

 

[NightCrawler]

True Image 7 is great.

Always nice to take the main partition back to a fresh and peppy time after I've installed all the crap betas.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Yeah that's what I'm hoping to do. I've kept my drive pretty clean, maybe I'll just make an image right now.

 

[MetroRider]

btw, what OS are you using and planning on imaging?