I use Acronis and like it. be sure to make recovery floppys so that you can boot from scratch. For AV... Check out 'Komodo' -- it is a FREE package --- you can select just the AV or any additional items like the integrated firewall ( it is so cautious it is all most a nuisance but it works) and spam killer, etc. Do not know how they do it for free and no advertising. RobSea
Or if you're like me and have no floppy drive, make sure the CD/DVD player is set to boot (pressing the space bar when prompted) before the HDD does. Otherwise, the BIOS will attempt to start the HDD first and will never get to the Acronis CD.
The CD boot for Acronis runs just fine and is fast. Easy to make also. Instead of imaging the disk for a backup consider "cloning" the disk. Acronis does both but cloning is faster.
Make sure you have windows defender for spyware. You can replace norton with www.grisoft.com there program is called AVG it is updated daily and has a free and purchasable version. It doesn't hog any resources and has strong protection.
Casper XP. It does one thing... clone an XP drive... And does it very well. A good setup is 2 SATA drives... say c: and e: They can be different makes or sizes... And Casper XP maintains 2 exact clones. Since the drives are byte by byte identical... Both are bootable. If something happens to drive c: Just swap the SATA cables... And your clone e: nows becomes your new c: drive. I have 5 or 6 PCs setup this way.