Once you’ve got to the stage you want to keep, and you’re ready to put that “stage” of your PC into a final “emergency recovery” form, you’re almost ready to begin Sysprep (if you want a “several PC” image) or Ghost (If you only want to image this 1 PC).
I say almost, because there are a few steps you really should complete before you lock that PC state into history. You can make that image a lot easier to manage if you do a bit of housekeeping before creating it.
Housekeeping Tasks you should undertake
* Go to Control Panel, “Power Options”, and the “Hibernate” tab, and uncheck it.
Why? It saves space you don’t need to use up in the ghost image. You can aways re-enable it afterwards if XP doesn’t do it for you.
* Go to “My Computer”,select your drive to be imaged (usually C:). Right click it, and choose to do a disk cleanup.
This will shift all the temporary files and “leftovers” that Windows leaves behind oh so frequently, freeing up more space that would otherwise be needlessly used.
* Back to Control Panel, System, “Advanced”, “Performance Settings”, and “Advanced” in that tab
In here, go to the “Virtual Memory” bit, and click the “change” button. Select “No Paging File”, and click “Set”. You’ll probably need to reboot XP at this point, and it may run slowly afterwards, because you’ve turned off the swapfile. Heyho-more space saved. Just don’t forget to check it’s been re-enabled and set to “system managed size” when you restore from the image.
Now, all that done, all boxes checked? Everything present, correct, and operating fine? 110% happy with the setup? GREAT!
Now, for the next step, decide what you want to do. Many PC’s? Or one and only one?