Hi everyone, I'm looking for a little advice! I've gotten rather tired of formatting my systems and reinstalling/configuring them all of the time and I'm sure there must be a better way! I've read a little about Norton Ghost and it sounds like it may be what I'm looking for; on the other hand I think virtualization through VMWare or something is another alternative.

Idealy I would like to have a clean, "save state" of my hardrive that I can load on startup, so that I will never have to worry about malware contraction nor having to reconfigure and install my tools when I need to format. Has anybody here used a similar configuration? Could I use VMWare in a similar fassion and load a preconfigured system image on startup? Any tips or links would be greatly apreciated!