The second method you link to is great and is basically Trueimage, but slightly more convoluted and you can’t exclude individual files. Also how do you restore to a computer which doesn’t boot?
In general something like the Trinity Rescue Kit is great for rescuing borked Windows systems, boot it off a CD and you can mount the NTFS volume read/write and fix whatever’s broken. If you need to image a machine in a hurry it’s useful for that too (dd if=/dev/sdXX of=/some/file/on/usb/drive, or dd if=/dev/sdXX | gzip -c >/some/file/on/usb/drive.gz) although doing a bitwise copy of the entire disc isn’t usually the most efficient way of doing it, it will serve if you’re stuck.
I don’t do electronics design consultancy. I have a business in electronics and have developed loads of products since the current business started in 1991, most of which are still selling and need to be maintained. So I run the 1995 Protel PCB 2.8 and a 1994 version of Orcad SDT/386 
These work fine up to winXP, which is what I run. Also I use the same tools for new designs – why not? They work fine.
I think everybody has to make a choice of which learning curves to climb up. There is an infinite number of them to choose from. I climbed up the Xilinx one in the 1990s and don’t ever want to do that again – especially as they made their later tools not backwards compatible, so one has to keep an old DOS6.2 PC somewhere, to maintain those products. I also chose to not climb up the whole “unix” / web server etc curve, though I might have to soon. When it comes to IT stuff I use for specific tasks, I am not really interested in climbing up any learning curve at all
Speaking of the Lenovo tablet, it actually doesn’t boot from any normal rescue media. The media needs to be UEFI and Trueimage offers to create that, but it does it only once after it is installed and the option does not appear again… not that I can find. Another few hours wasted.
Linux is not famed for having a particularly complete GUI
Of course not. Linux was conceived for grownups by grownups and continues to live by that concept. A good way to keep the foolhardy outside.
You sounds like a Cisco certified service engineer 
The biggest job support scheme ever (speaking as an ex owner of two 803 ISDN routers, bought for £2000 each and sold for £20).
Wish I was one – I’d not be jobless for almost half a year as I am now.
And ISDN was a rip-off by all suppliers, perhaps the last time the industry could agree on such a setup. Myself used Siemens equipment at the time.
Speaking of the Lenovo tablet, it actually doesn’t boot from any normal rescue media. The media needs to be UEFI
Yes – I saw that. The chances of getting that lot exactly right is close to zero.
UEFI can be disabled in the BIOS but it doesn’t seem to make any difference.
Also the win8 on the T2 tablet is 32-bit, not 64-bit.
Very strange…
