Tired of Installing Your OS?

[kandrathe]

I recently helped my parents purchase an HP computer. It came with Vista and like King Jim's, the OS install files were on a utility partition.

I don't know if there's a way to get them off the utility partition, but when I first booted the PC it prompted me to create recovery discs. I didn't do so at the time, but if I recall correctly the utility placed a shortcut to itself on the Start menu somewhere. You should be able to use that utility to create an OS install disc, or at the very least a disc which restores the PC to factory conditions.

Incidentally, my mom only made it 2 weeks with the new computer and Vista before asking me to "downgrade" her to XP.:) Now THAT was an ordeal.

I almost always re-image the computer with the non-OEM version of the OS. And, then I research and apply all the bios and driver updates. After I have the machine working with the base OS installed and minimal footprint I take a full image backup as my base rebuild image. I tend to install too much stuff over time, and so I've started making VMware my friend. All my experiments and trial software installs are now done inside a VM. My work gives me open access to most any OS and other software I want. I then buy licenses for what I use at home.

Back to the OP, and the recommended tools... At some companies where we have implemented Altiris we use BartPE to package automatic OS installs. At some others we use a less expensive tool called Kasaya, which among other features, also incorporates the Acronis Backup engine. I've tried and disabled Acronis on one of my machines, because my backup sets were starting to exceed 80MB, and it was using over 2/3rds of my local hard drive to store backups. I use BackupPC at home to backup my machines to my file server. That way I can maintain DR separately from my machines.