A Recovery Disk is one of the most important tools that you simply must have if you a poses computer. When you buy a computer from the computer store it comes full installed with an Operating System, in most cases Windows. It comes accompanied which has a Recovery Disk which enables you to recover your original Windows OS in the event of a failure.

OSes like Windows become very slow in time. Just the usage of the computer like net surfing, can damage your Windows registries by letting to certain sites to put in addons, plug-ins and software. If they are not installed you can’t surf, so you don’t have a choice. There are such a lot of software programs today that you need to install on a newly installed Windows OS to benefit from it, excluding device drivers, windows updates and patches, a complete reinstall of Windows with all you need might take a long time, over a couple of hours. To not mention specific settings and user settings used everyday.

Is the main reason why you must use a back-up solution, a sort of restoration of the OS. This can save you lot of your time needed by a fresh install of Windows OS|This will save the effort and energy of a new Windows installation}. You would get your data and all your settings restored on the date whenever you installed your system. You don’t need special computer skills for this proceadure. Another advantage is that it may be done on all Windows flavours (95, 96, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, NT).

There are special tools for this operation like Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image. They are surely both simple, fast, effective and no cost. How they work ? They make a clone of your desired hard drive partition, in our case C: partition (if we suppose that Windows is installed on C:). This is an system image with all the files contained on that disk partition: the entire windows file system, profile files, device drivers and installed software. All the settings that you just have are copied on that ghost image. So, it’s better to full install Windows with all its drivers, service packs if you'll notice any, patches and updates, software that you use and specific user configuration. In fact, prior to you do a clone of the Windows OS I advise you to make use of the computer for a few days, until you possess the full installation and settings you use daily. At that time just install Norton Ghost or Acronis. Follow the steps (they are accompanied with good friendly helps and tutorials) for making a boot floppy disk or CD/DVD. Boot from them and do the copy of the Windows disk partition to an image file to a different disk partition. Reboot Windows from hard disk and save that image in a DVD.

In time when your Windows OS will have problems, it will be slow, having problems and errors at boot time, you simply boot from the floppy/CD Norton Ghost created disk and you choose to restore your saved image file for this operating system which contains your Windows installation.