I’d said earlier that I
make a "clean" mirror of any new computer, so I can restore that if I pass the
computer on to someone else. I finally got a chance to test if things worked as
well as I hoped — and it did.
Our Windows Media Center PC in the kitchen, which my wife mainly uses, has
never really worked properly. If you pushed record, the live picture would go
all fuzzy. That got fixed after we sent it back to
Elonex, but then it started to drop the
volume on some channels mysteriously or not switch properly.
We had the Prosentia 1050 machine that Elonex offered, purchased last
December. But not long after we bought that, the company seemed to stop selling
that particular setup as a Media Center PC. After enough back-and-forth with the
tech department, I asked if we could just return it for some credit and upgrade
to the Exentia system that they still sell. Various tech people who’d been to
our house had expressed enough surprise that the Prosentia was working as a
Media Center PC that I decide the hardware in it probably wasn’t up to snuff,
unlike the case with the Exentia.
To Elonex’s credit, they offered a full refund on the old machine, which was
unexpected, unasked for and welcomed. But that meant the machine had to go back
– would my "clean" backup work?
I had made the backup with
Acronis True
Image version 6, and I got all types of hassle in trying to get that to
restore because the system kept saying the disk was busy. I then installed
version 7, which I had later upgraded to. That worked like a charm, letting me
boot into the restore program. About an hour later, the system was like new –
without my data and ready to go back.
