I'm running about a 6 year old XP box here that is left on all the time. For the second time, my bacon has been saved by having images of my hard drive. I'm using a product by Acronis called True Image (I know there are others) and it has worked flawlessly both times, just replace the dead drive, boot from the rescue CD that contains the program and start restoring. You can even change your partition sizes as you restore (I went from a 320 GB drive to a 500GB drive). The company maintains support forums where questions are generally answered fairly quickly and also offer a pay per incident option if you need quicker service. I have no connection with Acronis other than being a very satisfied user

True Image can restore a fully-working Windows XP operating system ?

Hi Dale, yes! What this type of program does is make a complete "image" of your drive(s) so if your PC was working OK when you cut the image it will work OK when you restore.. When doing a disaster recovery you will wind up with the same desktop, installed software, hardware, etc. you had when the image was made. There is no need to reinstall software, OS, or anything else. The disk image is a bit different than just saving copies of your files (I also use an off site backup by a company called MOZY), I am paying a whole $4.95 per month to store almost 200 GB of files on their servers. You'll need a high speed connection to use this type of service but IMHO it's cheap insurance for your files (photos, music, etc.) I have no affiliation with MOZY either, just a satisfied user. My personal method is to do a disk image monthly, or sooner if new software or hardware has been installed and to also do a backup of my email on a weekly basis. The email backup is a simple file export from Outlook

I recall Norton Ghost or some such software that could image-copy XP, but it required identical hard drives on either end of the transfer. So if your software can copy XP from any drive to any other drive, then either there's no security on your copy of XP, or the software you have breaks the security. Does that mean that anyone who has True Image could distribute an unlimited number of fully-functioning copies of Windows XP?

I'm not sure on this so someone else please jump in here but I believe that the same hardware environment would also have to exist on any additional host PC's in order for that to be possible, IOW same MOBO, and chipset, HDD's, video cards etc. I have used Ghost in a corporate setting to speed up deployment of new PC's but they were all the same units hardware wise.

Ghost and True Image are about the same thing. The hardware environment doesn't matter a lot. The key thing is that the hardware on the new machine has to have drivers available on the ghosted installation. If not the system will probably not be able to boot.

As to copying the OS, Xp (or Vista) will pretty much require activation on any change. So when you restore your image expect to have to do an activation. (And if you've had to restore it a few times expect to make a phone call to Mickeysoft.)

All of that was true as of the last time I used such software. (A year or two ago.)

Hi Penguin, I've not been asked to revalidate XP as yet but the changes I've made to the system thus far have been limited to size or type of HD, which, as I understand things, does not usually give MS fits