Scratch that first question. said:
Lucky, no Thanksgiving here ;-(
Sorry to hear that. Hope you made the best of it. One year, I went back home
for a surprise visit and found my entire family had gone out of town. I
ended up eating alone in a hospital cafeteria because, in those days, it was
the only place open... besides White Castle. <g>
Anyway, I spent yesterday configuring Ghost 2003 on my box and I couldn't be
happier. Thanks again for your recommendation, Peter. Except for number 3 on
my OP, which I found out in here wasn't really necessary, it does exactly
what I want. In fact, the only thing it doesn't do is allow me to put all of
the programs required on the boot disk. I still have to feed it the second
diskette containing ghost.exe after the boot DVD disk, the reason of which
I'm not really sure as there's room on the DVD. It burned my boot disk/image
file on DVD+R with my relatively recent Liteon 811s without the need for any
additional s/w. I successfully restored from both DVD and secondary hd
without incident which, after my True Image experience, was an absolute
delight. Later on, I'll set it up for a network restore.
I didn't have to have any other company specific s/w installed and running
like DirectCD or InCD to burn, which was one of my primary goals as I hate
the way packet-writing s/w intertwines itself with the OS. With Ghost 8.0
installed, there's nothing running after I disable the Ghost Start Tray app
and I disabled the Ghost Start Service in services.msc after I did the
backup. All in all, a clean minimally invasive program that does what I want
it to. Now in six months when I do a re-format/re-install of XP, I won't
have to feed disks and answer dialog boxes.
And to answer the question about what .NET and/or XP did to my box, I'll
have to be brief so I don't bore you do death. The somewhat short version...
to update my ATI video driver required .NET. After doing a bit of research,
it seemed to be fairly benign so I did it. Without my realizing it, after
the install it kicked me into an Administrator account rather than my named
account with admin privileges. When I went to check messages on Usenet, all
of my previous posts, sent email, etc were obviously gone, as were the
documents in My Documents. After a more than momentary panic which about
lasted 10-15 minutes, I figured out what it had done and logged back into my
account. Not a good beginning experience. <g>
Then I found a couple of web pages that previously loaded fine would not
load in Firefox 1.0 including, not surprisingly, M$ owned hotmail.com. I
immediately thought of the old adage, "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't
run." but even this wasn't that big a deal as another box on my network
could access the account. Then my apps started acting hinkey. I'd get weird
error messages that I hadn't received before. I use an Adobe program called
Premier Pro quite extensively and it's always been rock solid stable. Now,
it was buggy as hell. Went to Adobe forum and while this hadn't happened to
anyone else, several there advised to go ahead an "upgrade" to SP2 as it
might "fix" the problem. I did my research and there were no obvious
conflicts with the apps I use so I, against my better judgment as I pride
myself in a stable system, created a Restore point and "upgraded" to SP2.
Keep in mind I never did the video driver upgrade because I was still trying
to troubleshoot the various bugs.
When the system came back up, the system got even more hinkey. _Every_ one
of my Adobe apps had to be re-authorized because my "system had changed". I
still couldn't log on to hotmail.com and even more puzzling, and I'm not
sure if this was from .NET or SP2, but now I could not post _anything_ over
16 lines of 72 characters on Usenet. Now that doesn't sound too bad because
I'm not a binary uploader and I snip the messages I reply to pretty
extensively, but get in a long thread or try to explain something (like this
situation) and you realize how limiting that amount is. I essentially
couldn't post to Usenet.
Damn, this is a long post.... anyway, I fought with it for a couple of more
hours and finally decided to do a System Restore to get me back where I
started. And of course, it _didn't_ restore my system... "Windows was unable
to restore your system, no changes have been made." GRRRRR. That's when I
decided to format and re-install everything. After feeding disks and
answering dialog boxes, I got my system back up _but_ all of the things I'd
done to customize my system/gui over the past six months were gone. It
doesn't sound like much, but I tweak my system pretty extensively and
something as basic as Autologon had to be remembered and re-done. And there
were _many_ others as well. This was _not_ a fun situation. <g> After I got
my system back the way I wanted, I knew I didn't want to do it again so I
decide to use an imaging program and that's how I ended up in here. BTW, I
_never_ did update the video driver. <vbseg>
Whew! I have posted anything this long in years. Anyway, thanks to all who
posted in this thread. The karma thing on Usenet is pretty real to me so
I'll hang out in here a while to try and pay back for the help I've
received.