Using your personal computer

 

Hilton Head Island Computer Club

Images

 

Next Page    Home Page

In the making of an exact copy of a hard drive or partition you need to use what is called cloning / imaging software.   I have been a big proponent of images for the last few years.  This is the way most of the computers you buy are set up and also used in setting up many similar computers in the business, educational, etc. environments.

 

The use of this software can be very useful on an individual bases for protection from many computer issues today.  I am thinking about backup, virus attacks and a very bloated computer.   Let’s look at these one at a time:

1. Backup:  This type of backup does the whole operating system at one time.  Although you could add another drive and do a drive to drive cloning I do not think that is a good approach unless you are replacing an older drive with a larger and faster new one (many time the hard drive manufacturer supply the software to do this).  Creating an image make it easy to define what you have.  You may elect to create your first image when the computer is new and without problems.  Later your images would be replaced each time with the latest backup.  This image would also be use if your computer was attacked by a virus and basically ruined your system.  Generally the image you create using high compression will be about ½ the size of the drive/partition.  The imaging software that I have used will not create a file larger the about 2 GB and will create addition files as needed.   The largest problem with images is you need software to restore the original drive/partition using the image.  The software I have used is Drive Image and Ghost and they provide a way to create floppy type restoring.

2. Virus Attacks:  This area is getting to be a very large problem.  Besides the virus we now have the

worms, Trojan horses and browser capture.  The worms and Trojans capture you computer and use them for spam and site attacks without you having any idea that it is happening.  Browser capture does many of the same things of the previous group but add key loggers.   Key loggers track every use of your key board looking for passwords and other personnel data.  Everything here is getting more difficult to find.  Recently I had some funny happening on my computer and could not find the problem.  I could not complete a full scan using Norton Antivirus and it would just restart the computer without and input during the scan.    SpyBot would sometime get through the scan or either restart or lock up.  I updated my daily backup and redid the Windows XP OS and programs.

3.   Bloated Computer:  This problem is probably the worst as it happens over time and most computers that I have seen the individual was unaware of how it happened.  Problem is there are many programs loaded when you receive the computer and you try many more.  Many programs start parts of their program every time the computer is started and this puts the computer in harms way quickly.  Utilities have a tendency to interfere with the program and operating system and other utilities.   Many of these users do not know how to properly uninstall the programs or worst yet they just delete them.  Finally even if you delete them properly they almost always leave junk in the registry.  Almost all the users like me that use many programs and try some and then uninstall run into this bloated problem.  I find myself in this position after about a year on my computer.  I try to keep an image of the OS and the core programs and go back there when the bloats appear.