in case of a windows crash

[ruckus49]

my windows xp was freezing upon startup. it wasnt a huge deal because i have everything backed up. still its a pain in the ass to reinstall everything. do any of you have some kind of rescue disk so you can get windows up and running without having to reinstall?

[Echoi]

i dont know about any windows specific stuff

but theres a program you may want to download called Hiren 10

if its a hard drive problem you have, that program is the shit trust me, got me out of enough bother in the past

[Malicious]

Download/buy a hardrive "image" program (like Norton Ghost) and do a clean wipe of your PC (or if it's already crashed). Install windows and update it with all the service packs, and install all your basic programs (including Antivirus/firewall), then take an image of your hardrive using that program. This means next time it crashes or you decide to wipe everything all you need to do is run that image and everything will be installed and be running fine (this basically saves you from having to install everything seperately, which takes forever and is incredibly annoying)

Also, make sure you save that image on your backup hardrive, so you dont also lose that when the hardrive gets wiped...

Or you could do a image of your pc as it is atm (with everything on there), but this means that you'll have to keep reimaging it every few weeks to make sure you dont lose any of the changes you've made recently... (which if you're backing up on a different harddrive anyway is kinda pointless)

but if thats what you ment by "backing things up", then I don't think theres much more you can do.

[Echoi]

do get a copy of hiren though, you may have bad boot sectors like i did, that will sort them out a treat, plus do a whole load of other neat stuff

[deadly_habit]

http://www.piriform.com/recuva
combined with windows self backup images
ghost is a good prog to have too

[moki]

Usefull!