Originally posted by Vorpal
It sucks, they all suck. They put overhead on your system.
There is only one good answer: Norton Ghost.
Learn to make a series of images started at the first desktop hit after an installation. The last image of the series should be your system with all drivers installed and every APP/GAME you normally use. Install games on another drive to avoid backing up savegames.
If my system ever starts feeling "funny" I just backup: Favorites, My Docs, and email into a backup folder on another drive and resotre a Ghost image.
A 3Gig OS partition takes about 15-20 minutes to backup or restore.