BackTrack was the winner of our recent Hive Five for best Live CD, so we decided to take it for a test drive and show off a few of the features for everybody else. BackTrack can be installed to a regular boot cd, a USB drive, installed to the hard drive, or even downloaded as a VMware virtual machin...

It may have been a while since you considered using Windows' built-in tools for backing up your data, but for the average user with media and crucial file needs, Windows 7's default backup features look promising. Windows Vista was the first version of Windows to introduce a consolidated Backup and ...

When you've got your Windows XP or Vista setup running perfectly, you don't want to lose all your painstaking customizations to a reckless tot, an experiment-minded friend or spouse, or a rogue system-lousing program. Windows SteadyState, as we mentioned earlier this week, helps you to create a kind...

Linux.com writes up a helpful guide to creating your own custom system recovery boot disc using an Ubuntu 8.04 CD image, a little command line work, and a few recommended emergency tools, including the partition format/restore tool GParted, e2undel, a file recovery tool, and anything else you might ...

In the previous installment of this article, you learned about the different system recovery options available in Vista. We also took a closer look at one of the options — the Startup Repair option. Now, in part II, we will look at the remaining recovery options and what each is designed for. ...

Vista includes several options that you can choose from to recover your system — depending on what kind of an error you are experiencing. The System Recovery option let you perform tasks such as restoring critical files that Windows uses to start, to restoring your entire computer using a back...