I still don't quite see what these programs do (when they work right), that the imbedded Win XP utility System Restore doesn't do ...
Difference is that Ghost 10.0 makes an image of your Windows 2000/XP installation. That image is roughly 2-4 gigabytes. Your store that image wherever you like. One good choice is your hard drive is partitioned and you store it on D, your storage partition. A better choice would be on an external USB hard drive in case your hard drive fails
What is in the image I keep? XP + SP2 + 6 of my most often used programs. This image is good for any of my computers that has the same motherboard
Computer administrators love Ghost. They have 100 identical computers that have the same programs installed for the workers. Whenever a computer has severe trouble he re-installs everything a worker needs in a matter of minutes. He need only take that Ghost image (a master image really) and install it on the bad computer. He may have just put in a new hard drive in it or by re-installing with that Ghost image he is at the same time reformatting the funky hard drive
Administrator will probably have his Ghost master image on an external USB had drive.... Can the RESTORE function in XP do all that? NO WAY!
I have never had a problem with Ghost 10.0 and yes I saw the same bad reviews. I have three computers. I have a very good Ghost image for one of them. Still have to do the other two. I'm not happy with XP on the last two because of adding programs, removing programs, plus general sludge and funk after 18 months of an XP installation
SO.... I will reinstall XP + SP2 + all updates + 8 most used programs then make a Ghost image and store it away. So I can make an easy reformat once a year or sooner if I mess it up. AND WITH GHOST this "base installation" will take a grand total of 10 minutes. I will admit that some time will be taken to re-install another 10 programs I like and use.
Ghost (and similar utilities) are a wonderful thing for people who are responsible for hundreds or thousands of computers. To be honest, I haven't used any version of Ghost since Ghost Corporate Ed 7.5, which is still perfectly good today. For instance, when a big company receives a new computer, they need to configure it. If they're on a Microsoft Volume License plan, they need to wipe the drive (if it came with anything on it in the first place), install the OS, install all the patches, apps, utilities, etc. If you've ever set up a Windows XP system, you know that it can take all day just to get one system just right. At that point, you run "sysprep," a microsoft utility that wipes out the workstation specific information, making the system "generic" and ready to install on the network. Then you create the ghost image. For big companies, that image is placed on a server. Then when the company takes delivery on the other 99 computers of that order, they simply plug those computers into the network, turn them on, and begin dumping the image down to the computers. The corporate edition of ghost has a utility known as "GhostCast," which is a multicast utility, which allows you to send 1 image to as many computers as you have network ports and bench space all at the same time. For instance, the last place I worked had enough bench space to ghost 15 computers at a time. It actually took longer to unbox and plug in all the computers than it did to "ghost" the drives.
It's also terrific for making an emergency backup of a system. There have been situations where a drive was about to fail that we were able to same most of the data to an image, and then use a utility known as "ghost explorer" to pull the critical files out of the image.
Mark