How do I back up Vista?

My sons laptop took a dump last night. How do I back up Vistakhuon mau He turned it on to do his homework, it got past the splash screen then ... nothing. No Vista. just a black screen.
Repair installation did not work.
Restore point did not work.
Safe mode..it hangs up at CRCDRIVER.SYS Will not go past it.
Only option I have is to try and re-install everything from scratch. EEEch!
The repair software had a restore from backup option. Since it was never backed up, I could not restore that way.
I just bought a 500Gig external drive and downloaded Acronis. (If thats what I need.)
So somewhere along the way, I make an image of the hard drive. And a few days later, Vista dies again. If Acronis is the right software, how would I go about restoring the image to the laptop? would I have to install Vista then Acronis, then tell it to transfer the image back? I'm kind of lost here. Or would I have a copy of Acronis on a seperate partition on the external drive and work it from there? Transfer the saved image to the black drive?
I'm familiar with Acronis unless someone has a better/easier way to do this. I just downloaded about 18 drivers from Sagers website. There has got to be an easier way.!
FYI Laptop is a Sager NP2096, Vista Premium 64 bit, 320G HD, 4G Ram, P8600 CPU, 9600M GT GPU.

 

You mean Burn a boot CD

 

Assuming the free version can do that

 

Very strange error, plenty of discussions regarding that .sys file through 'net search, from bad drive/memory, networking (bad wireless, bad driver-unplug cat5 cable)...

Perhaps try f8 option to load non-signed drivers or do a chkdsk.