Back-up & restore software

[howie7]

Asus M4A785TD MB
AMD 2.8 Tricore CPU
4 Gb Ram
Windows Vista
Samsung 1TB HD
Windows Vista Home premium

I am thinking of purchasing an external HD for backing up mine (Vista) and two other pc's (XP) hard drives.

Can anyone please advise of suitable, easy to use software, which would easily make complete back-ups (Operating system, application & data) of our PC's.

Can I back-up each PC to a separate partition on the external HD, and how easy would it be to restore same.

[slgrieb]

My first choice would be Acronis True Image Home. I don't think you can beat it's combination of features and performance, plus the price is reasonable. The One-Click Backup will search for an external drive and back up your entire drive to it. Just about as simple as it gets. The current versions of True Image have a very simple, clear interface that's a real improvement over earlier versions. For instance, the Tasks and Logs section gives you a calendar based, color coded view of your backup operations. The software offers lots of customization as well.

Norton Ghost is still a decent choice, but I think it is mostly playing catchup in terms of features and has poorer performance with higher memory requirements. Plus, it costs 40% more.