The numerous and confusing differences among Windows Vista versions have led many people to opt for Home Premium ($240, or $160 for an upgrade from XP) rather than the full featured Ultimate ($399, or $260 for an upgrade). But here’s how you can give Home Premium many Ultimate style features, often for free.
Make Image Backups
The backup program built into Vista Ultimate lets you make images that exactly duplicate a disk or partition, byte for byte. Through it you can easily restore a failed disk with the operating system, files, and settings running as they did before the crash. You can add this feature to Home Premium by shelling out $50 for Symantec’s Norton Save & Restore or Acronis’s True Image; but as Steve Bass points out, you can obtain the Acronis product for only $29 through Gene Barlow’s user group. If you have a Seagate or Maxtor hard drive, you can download free versions of DiscWizard and MaxBlast–imaging utilities that are based on Acronis True Image. An unpolished-but-free alternative is DriveImage XML from Runtime Software.
Read the full guide via PC World
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