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As a long time user of imaging software, starting with Norton’s Ghost, then on to Acronis, I have found Acronis to be rock solid. I haven’t been chasing each new release. If you have Acronis 2014 or newer you can image, clone, and restore any Acronis backup image. Acronis is available for free from various oems. If you use a 2014 or newer version of Acronis it can handle UEFI or BIOS firmware. Acronis 2013, plus a patch, was the transition to UEFI. For a new user they can use the free oem versions of Acronis. The current oem versions are a year or so older than the current commercial version, but they are at least Acronis 2016 or newer and there is n o time limit. If you are using a drive made or owned by Seagate or Western Digital there are free versions of Acronis that support the essential functions. Western digital is here, and Seagate is here. As long as you have one brand of their drive connected to the system, internally or externally, you can run the oem Acronis regardless of which drive is backed up to any other drive.

There are other OEMs that have a free version of Acronis for cloning your old drive to their new products.

Acronis will backup the newest drives with Optane memory in a Raid configuration from Windows. Since the restore is from an offline/Linux version of Acronis, and since Linux doesn’t have a driver for the Intel software raid for Optane memory, Acronis won’t restore… but wait, just go to the bios, change raid to AHCI, make the restore, then switch back to raid.

There is an issue with the Windows 7 SP1 installation. It is known that when performing the Windows 7 SP1 update, it needs to be installed solo. Do not install SP1 in a bundle with any other patches. I was patching two identical PC’s last spring with SP1, etc. The first PC had monitor problems when I tried to upgrade a bundle of patches with SP1 in the bundle. After some research, I was able to rollback the SP1 on the first computer and reinstall solo. Installing the SP1 solo on the second identical computer was uneventful.

I know those listed products will find the keys for Windows, however, they also show up as spyware. I prefer two other programs that are also much more useful in additional ways. Both programs are also free utilities.
The first application is Belarc Adviser. Not only does it retrieve your Windows keys, but it pulls out most other product keys. The report also provides pages of detailed information that is very helpful to the computer owner and or a repair person to understand that specific computer.

The second application is Speccy. It doesn’t pull out as much information as Belarc, however, it pulls out the Windows key, and also goes deeper into component details, such as the exact brand, voltage, etc of installed memory modules. It pulls up the current temperatures of the motherboard, hard drive and CPU. It has a detailed SMART report on the hard drive.

Apparently these are better kept secrets than doing an in place upgrade of Windows XP, Vista, or 7. I have been using the above programs for troubleshooting, repairing, and upgrading computers for at least 8 years.

Cheers,

Dave Leippe

The last time I looked my Windows 7 firewall was a two way firewall. I do however, continue to use the two way firewall, Sygate, which is still available in SystemSuite.

I encourage all my students and computer club members to partition their drives. Most are making their own image of their C: drive for a full system backup. Also,by moving the User in Vista and Windows 7 to D: they are very capable of keeping their personal data backed up and away from C: by just copying to an external device. They pay attention to my characterizing the C:drive as the “war zone”.

Also, regarding the seven steps, I thought the article was very good. It echos many of the steps I take when setting up windows 7 for other users. I go a little beyond. I make a temporary image, wipe off all the trial ware, delete the recovery partitions. Then I repartition the drive so that Windows 7 gets about 50gb of a 500 gb drive. I make several other partitions. The second partition(s) are reserved for data or media. I save one partition at the end with 30-50gb of space. I use Acronis to make an image of C. I move the User to the D drive. That moves all of the desktop clutter to D. So if C, or Windows 7, or “the war zone” gets trashed, I can reimage from Acronis quickly, and no data is lost. I use Acronis because it compresses and can also convert to a VHD if you want to make a virtual machine.

I have noticed that many single partitioned drives might have several gigabytes of stuff on their desktop, and that is usually not backed up.

It is insane not to partition these new large drives and leave Windows comingled with user data.

I would run thorough test of your memory modules.

If you don’t have a backup of important stuff off site, you don’t have a backup. In California with earthquakes, floods, and fires a possibility, consider online storage sites. there are many free ones and inexpensive ones to choose from. They are as close as gmail drives or “sky drive”.

Otherwise, flash drives and camera cards are so easy, fast, and inexpensive that you could easily have an A and a B and keep one some where else and rotate.

Cheers,

Hi Rebecca;

Both my wife an I teach and use Photoshop Elements for Organizing and editing. Actually my wife is a Photoshop CS power user. We have tried Bridge and other “organizers”, but the Photoshop Elements Organizer is the best. I cringe when I read that you are renaming photos and trying to rearrange them. I have been there and won’t use Windows or Picasa for this feature.

If you use the PSE Organizer, you can put multiple labels on each photo, you can search on the labels, and you can create special project folders. They call them “collections” or now they are called “albums.” Within an album you can drag the photos in to any order you like. In the main photo catalog or photo index (they also call it the “PhotoBrowser”) all photos are represented by a thumbnail that is an electronic card like in an old fashioned card catalog, except, once you have listed the photos in the catalog, they are listed in the digital creation date. Windows lists them in the modified date order. You are never really moving the photos,just creating links to different groups. It really works well.

But once they are listed you will soon discover that you no longer care what the file name are or their folder locations. All photos in all folders are now viewed in one virtual folder, the Photo Browser. If you need to “export” a batch of photos to someone, you can select the photos in the browser, and then batch rename those photos to whatever specification you like and do other batch modifications on the fly.

We have been using and teaching this product for about seven years. We have over 13,000 photos in our catalog. There is no need to have a his and hers catalog. It is very easy to archive the photos, it is very easy to backup and/or move the entire library of photos and catalog details. Within the Photo Browser you have access to the metadata. You can add audio notes to each photo. You can add text notes to each photo. You can easily modify the digital creation dates of one or a hundred photos all at once. The Organizer offers instant full screen or side by side previews.

If you are interested you can get free full working trial downloads from Adobe. If you are on a budget, you can get licensed copies of older versions from Amazon. Version 6 will work with Windows 2000 or later and only needs 512mb ram. Version 7 or 8 require 1.0gb of ram or more and Windows XP or later OS.

I have always used windows explorer to organize my files. I am a photographer and am constantly needing to rearrange the order of images and rename them. Now that I have windows 7, I find it won’t let me move files around. I don’t use My Pictures–I use folders with custom names on the hard drive Is there a way to get it to let me organize my files?.