One of the first things to do after bringing home your new Surface RT is to create a Recovery Drive: a USB flash drive capable of bringing an ailing Surface RT to life, even if the Surface’s built-in recovery partition is damaged.

Q: You said earlier that there may be trouble when putting a System Image onto a different PC. I always thought that when my PC finally goes kaput, I could put the old PC’s System Image onto the new one. That way I’d be right where I started. What should I do? A: First, a […]

Q: What’s the difference between a System Image backup versus a backup of the registry? When should we back up the registry? A: The Windows registry is simply a database: a bunch of text and numbers, as shown to the left. It’s a mighty powerful database, though, because Windows stores thousands of important settings inside […]

(This is the first of a series of posts covering information taken from my latest book, Upgrading and Fixing Computers Do-It-Yourself For Dummies.) Windows 7’s Backup and Restore program lets you create a “System Image,” as well as a regular backup. Different from a regular backup, System Image contains everything on your computer’s C drive: […]

Q: I want to mirror my hard drive on an external hard drive. On page 237 of Windows 7 For Dummies, your book says “the  [Backup and Restore] program also creates a system image – an exact copy of the drive Windows 7 lives on.” Is this what I want? A: Windows 7’s Backup and […]