Journal #5997

All the programs that take the longest to install...

Ouch. Sorry to hear.

I hate when that happens. What's really a bitch for me is when I have to go through re-installing the printer, scanner, pen tablet and webcam along with all the different programs and drivers that go with them.

And then you get all those drivers that FORCE you to reboot instead of asking you nicely if you wanna do it later so you can keep installing crap.

There's some programs out there, the so called "disk imaging tools", that enables you to backup, restore or clone your entire hard drive or selected partitions along with the installed programs, user settings, registry and all. What they do, is to basically take a "snapshot" of your hard drive's contents and make a bootable install disk out of it, in other words, an exact clone of your hard drive. You can restore the image later to the same or a different drive, and also choose to copy the drive directly to another one.

A lot of this programs are not free, but here are two good choices that are freeware:

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/DriveImageXML.html

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/easustodo.html

"step-by-step over the phone...?"

Wow, that was mighty nice of you vs49688. You realize some people charge a fee for that kind of service, right?

That's totally not fair! I told you what I needed to do and you just told me how to do it because I didn't know how.