Hunglung

Zero answers or comments must mean I didn't do my homework. I'll do some research and come back with a better question (or the answer), I hope. Hunglung

I have had to reinstall Windows XP countless times, so it would be great not having to download and reinstall SP2, subsequent hot fixes, JAVA Runtime, DirextX 9, .NETFramework 1.1, .NET Framework 2.0, Windows Media Player 10, Acrobat Reader, and so on. Those would be hassel enough, but then I still have to reinstall all my Program Files before my computer is restored to it's original pre-crash status. So I have a question. Windows XP has access to NTBACKUP.exe in the Valueadd\MSFT\NTBackup folder of the the original installation disc. I don't know how it does it, but one of the backup options is "All information on this computer" which "includes all data on this computer, and creates a system recovery disk that can be used to restore Windows in case of a major failure". [Now that I think of it, that option may be available only to Windows NT users. Anyway the choice is shown.] Then below that is the choice "Let me choose what to back up". I just choose the Program Files folder and at the bottom of MyComputer is a choice called "System State". In my case these contain 1.55MB and took only 2 minutes and 22 seconds to backup. Why can't nLite and/or RVM Integrator be used to update the Program Files and System State, too? That would make it a truly complete restoration package, and a very valuable utility to many thousands of XP users ... until they learn to use Linux! I'm thinking the Program Files and System State would have to backed up to CD (preferably RW, and restored/overwritten) periodically, but what am I not thinking about when it comes time to try to restore these with nLite or RVM Integrator? Thanks for your help.