Don't forget a new drive image and a new set of backups .......
~sigh~
What is a drive image?
mollyjazz wrote:~sigh~
What is a drive image?
Sorry -- I was confusing your situation with another current one where the user was I think in a later version of WIndows and had an image.
A drive image is a file that contains an image, in compressed form so it doesn't use so much space, of eveything on the whole hard drive and which can if your drive crashed would enable you to put in a new drive and then restore the image back to the empty drive so that you were exactly where you were when you made that image -- that may not be exactly where you were when the drive crashed but at the very least it saves a lot of time in geting the operating system back up and running -- say 6 - 8 minutes instead of the hour or so to reinstall WIndows.
Windows 7 comes with a pretty good imaging system built in but XP didn't.
I was going to say to get your IT guy to make if for you and keep it safe but it just occured to me that if you have a Seagate, Maxtor or Western Digital hard drive they have a copy you can download free of a version of True Image that does the job even on XP. And you make a bootable recovery disk from the program from which you can run the Restore application to get the files back.
Can you check what drive you have in your laptop and I'll get the link for you ....
Back ups you know and are simpler and quicker to make but one image from early on when you know the system is clean and running OK is a great thing to have.
I have a western digital
Here's a link to the WesternDIsital Download page for their version of a commercial imaging program -- it just requires that you have at least one WD drive in your PC.
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119&wdc_lang=en
That's a page I got when I selected on specific drive type -- WD Green Caviar -- from the different types listed here:
http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=6&lang=en
assuming that your drive is SATA and not PATA/EIDE the older type. But I doubt that there is any difference in the imaging program itself.
Even more general is http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?wdc_lang=en
The first will give you a download link for the manual so I suggest you download that to your PC then you can go through it and get the feel. When you've done that if you have any questions ....
Thanks for all your help. My computer is running fine. There were issues with Incredimail. The hard drive is good, Norton seems to be doing what it should. So for now....all is well. Thanks again for your help and suggestions!!!
Good to know -- keep it that way!