Loading a clean system image on startup?

[Liquid_Darkness]

How much resources does your system have? VMWare has to run on top of your operating system... so you'll need a lot of resources.

Ahh, I didnt think about that... My laptop wouldnt handle the Virtual Machines so well, nor would the majority of my test machines, but this may still be an option on my main PC.

Ghost is also pretty nice. However, if you're like me... it'll be a pain to manage. I'm constantly installing/uninstalling programs for testing and playing around. You'll have to update your ghost image pretty often.

Intersting. I wonder if that would be more trouble than it is worth. Idealy I would test new software on a seperate machine before moving it over to my laptop for everyday use, at which point I would add it to my ghost image. I guess that is a configuration I will have to try before I know if it will work.

I run Ghost 8 from a Bart PE cd. You can find such an animal via
bitorrent (look for PE iso's), but it's emminently more satisfying to
build the image yourself. And with Bart PE, I'm typically ghosting
to an external hdd via a USB-to-IDE cable. PDQ.

That is a VERY interesting configuration... Let me make sure I understand you correctly. You boot off of a BartPE cd, then load a Ghost image(of Windows not Bart PE) from there? So you are essentially using a Ghosted image of Windows from a boot CD and saving to an external HDD? I think we have a Winner!

I dont see anything wrong with a format\reinstall...
I do it often...

Best way to clean a system...IMHO

I agree.

While most ( ) of the above ideas are good suggestions, you may
think along a completely different path: reborn cards[1].
As Phish said - it all depends on your needs (How often do you
find yourself formatting and reinstalling?).

The plus is that you can restore the clean state of your (real) machine at
every restart, or each week, or each month, or at some user-defined time).
This is in particular useful for public internet stations or crap-pcs (which are
in use for testing purposes and too weak to run vm's reasonably).
In addition, they are fairly cheap - accounting the time it takes to
create/restore images, vm's, ..., they are a fair bargain.


The minus is that you have to make sure to backup your data (same as
with all the above approaches) before restoring the old state...

Very cool! I have never heard of such a thing but I'm definatly going to pick up a few. This is the perfect solution for my old, test PC's and for my Public use computers. Not a viable solution for my laptop but I'm thinking Ghost/BartPE should do the trick.

Thanks again to everyone for the suggestions!