Windows Vista Equivalent of ASR for Vista?

My home computer and my laptop both have Windows XP Pro, which includes Automatic System Recovery (ASR) as a backup option. I've had to use that once when the operating system went haywire, and it restored all of the operating system and applications (but not their data) perfectly, formatting the disk, and bringing the computer back to where it was on the date of the creation of the ASR. This can also be used to recover everything in the event of a hard drive failure.

My daughter has a Dell Inspiron laptop with Windows Vista Home Basic. It has a recovery partition put on by Dell on the hard drive. If it were to have what happened on my XP, I would have been able to reinstall Windows from the recovery partition, but it is unsure if it would have left the applications in place. In the event that the hard drive failed, everything would have to go back on from installation disks.

I read on the internet that you can back all of the C: drive on Vista, but when I tried doing it on the home basic edition, the Windows product would only give the option to back up user data on the C drive, not the programs themselves (applications) as ASR did.

Is there any way to do on Vista what I can do with XP Pro and ASR, using the Windows products? If not, what other product(s) would I need to accomplish this?

 

Macrium Reflect Free is one of the utils I have been using on pre Win7 computers. Works great & you can schedule backups if you want.

 

Thank you for the suggestion. I downloaded it, and it made a compressed file of the whole disk drive including its partitions, which I've stored on a separate portable drive. This was a good solution.

Terry

 

Glad to help.