Please could you spell out how to obtain/download Trueimage for my ancient Dell Laptop running XP so I can (?) make a re-bootablecopy of the programmes too ?
You just buy the program and install it.
There is a function to create a bootable CD which the machine can then boot from if the HD has failed, and this contains a copy of TI which can access the backup file from say an attached DVD or blueray DVD drive, or even over a network. You need to test this boot CD after you have created it, to make sure it works.
The TI restore restores the O/S also. It doesn’t care what was on the HD. If the HD has failed, you put in a replacement (preferably one with the same interface i.e. SATA for SATA, etc) and do the restore. I have done that many times. Many times, a friend has brought back a laptop which I originally helped to configure for him, which got trashed by somebody going wild online with it, and I just restored the last TI HD image.
There is no issue with the programs; TI backs up the entire HD. It doesn’t care what is on the HD. It just backs up all the logical sectors that contain data. Under any modern O/S it isn’t really practical to backup individual programs (due to config storage issues etc). What I found TI doesn’t do is backup the recovery partition on Thinkpads (and probably other laptops) so if you lose a laptop HD you lose the laptop’s recovery feature, but that never bothered me.
Anyway after two weeks the ssd giving errors galore so its shagged. So I tryed and failed to reinstall the genuine xp copy again to find its a crock of shire. The hacked copy mind you worked first time.
That is a curious problem. Must have been a damaged CD. There are issues with SSDs and XP, but I have never seen problems on laptops. Only on desktops running 24/7 are there issues – consistently after about a year IME.
I think windows (XP onwards) gets a lot of undeserved bad press. It gets installed on loads of different hardware, 99% of which is beyond the O/S developers’ control, and since “everybody” hates M$ all the virus writers are trying to attack it. And because something like 99% of PC users run Outlook for email, that provides another handy attack vector. Outlook is a crappy piece of bloatware anyway, slow on all but the fastest hardware, and making it so obscure to backup one’s emails that almost nobody does it. Apple, OTOH, have had a great honeymoon for many years when they were adored as the underdog, keeping away the virus writers, and by stopping 3rd party hardware they at a stroke eliminated most of the problems. I don’t think Apple products are in any special way immune to attacks, and they have attracted huge resources in the Iphone/Ipad jailbreaking scene which demonstrated that they have just the same back doors as anybody else. The early jailbreaks involved just going to some website and downloading and opening a PDF.
