The journey of a thousand miles...

Hello!

This is my first post, and what can I say about myself?

Well I live in China (teaching English) but I'm a westerner, I'm not Chinese.

I spend a lot of time tinkering with various computers, but I'm definitely not an expert, (even though various other foreigners I know seem to think I am. Funny isn't how even these days some people seem to make a 'virtue' out of being computer illiterate, like even if they admit to a desire not to be that way, it's as if they're giving up any pretension to ever be considered 'cool'! :confused)

I come of course, mainly in search of knowledge. Please excuse me if my terminology or ideas are dumb, I may be wrongheaded, I'll admit that upfront.

Anyway what I want to learn about first is how to make a kind of image of a Windows XP installation (which would ideally fit on a CD) which I could use later to restore the whole C drive back to exactly the way it was when I made the image (including all the installed apps, etc.) Because living in China you seem to end up reinstalling your OS much more frequently for various reasons (it's virus heaven, however careful you try and be,) and I'm really bored with going through the whole tedious process of reinstalling apps etc etc.

Now I've seen some of the computer techs here (the Chinese ones, with whom I cannot communicate fluently) just stick a CD in a computer, press a button, and like 15 to 20 minutes later they've got a perfect (Chinese!) installation of Windows, with Office and various other bits and pieces all just there without having to be reinstalled. How? I wnat to make a CD like that for myself.

I just splashed out on something called Acronis True Image. Can I do it with that? I just backed up the C drive with it (to another partition), but the file is like 6GB or something and obviously that's not going to go on a CD, and I'd have no idea to boot from it even if it did!

Anyway kind of a long hello and I'm probably get gonna get snapped at now right, for posting in the wrong place or something, but anyway that's me, I've been in the wrong place most of my life I guess.

 

Hi and welcome to MGs

If you post your question in SOFTWARE one of the specialists will help you.

no one will snap your head off here, we are all here to learn and when possible impart a little knowledge.

it's a very user friendly forum with some of the best technical guys in the world.

 

Cheers Bill, I'll make another post in software!

 

:wave Tal and welcome to MG's..