Hi,

A techy novice looking for basic advice here.

I’ve just bought a MSI C630 laptop form Argos in the sale at £299, and was looking for advice on how best to get a backup done while it’s still it’s factory untouched state.

An extra question is whether there are any preinstalled programs it’s best to remove from the outset.

The final question is that a got it through Argos online, so if it’s no good, then I’ve got 5 days to return it. Is it ok for the money for basic home use?

Thanks

For what you have said you are going to use it for, basic home use, i would say it is fine.

The Notebook may come with a hidden recovery partition or disc disc which would allow you to recover it back to a factory state should anything go wrong. The documentation whithin the box should advise of this.

As it comes with Windows 7 Premium as it operating system this has backup functions built in. You can also create an "image" of your hard drive as well. I believe however that the image files contents cannot be viewed.

I use a the free version of a program called Macrium Reflect. This allows you to image your hard drive to an external drive. Should you encounter any problems and are unable to boot your PC into Windows you use the Macrium recovery cd, which the program prompts you to create, to copy your backed up image from your external hard drive to your computers hard drive. After a reboot your computer would be in the working state that it was in when the image was created. Another benefit of Macrium Reflect is that the image can be mounted and the contents can be viewed manually.

If you create images often then you wouldn't have to sit and go through all the Windows updates that you would have to do if you used the built in recovery partition or the recovery cd's.

I hope this information is of use to you.