Ghost

[Stringent]

I recommend peeps get a copy of Ghost or some such proggie. Normally it would take me 4hrs to get everything where I want it from scratch. Just do it the once, Ghost it somewhere, next time you need to scratch Windows, just restore the Ghost image! Takes 10mins, plus another 20ish to iunstall updates to various bits, done.

The CD is bootable and has most drivers for network cards so you don't have to store the image on your local PC. Maybe a netowrk drive somewhere else.

[Moby-Dick]

or use drive snapshot

which will take online images and is much cheaper to licence than ghost.

www.drivesnapshot.de/en/

[Stringent]

Got ghost version 9 from Fleabay for persoanly use. Might look into the linkie above for work. Thanks M-D.

[Krikkit]

I could never get Ghost to work properly on my machine, maybe i'll give drivesnapshot a try instead. Cheers M-D.

[edit]Actually, another solution springs to mind. Install all your stuff, take your HD out, put it into another computer, then WinRAR all the contents on the "best" compression settings. I got a 2GB OS down to 174MB the other day

[Moby-Dick]

compression is very relative.

take a drive full of jpg files and one full of word files and try and comrpess both. You'll see the difference

[unknown_user]

is there a simple guide to using Ghost? as i was looking into using it.

[Xophile]

I don't you really need a guide to use it as it's pretty straight forward. Especially if you purchase and use Ghost v 9 from Windows. There you can set everything up from a simple and logic user interface and then let it reboot and "do it's thing".

If you need some help with Ghost, feel free to contact me...