A New Search Begins

Before I get into this, I want to tease you a little bit with my experiences last night in Wrath of the Lich King. I started a Death Knight last night and got her (yes, her) up to level 58 (not a great feat considering you start at 55). The story line is well done, and although I knew how the starting area had to end up, I wasn't quite sure how it was going to get there. All in all (without any spoilers) it was well written, scripted, designed and animated. I was actually paying attention to the dialog and reading the text of the quests, if that tells you anything (I usually just accept and run and try to figure it out later. Not a good idea in this area!). Two thumbs WAY up.

 

OK, so my wife has been having issues lately with the dreaded BSOD, and sometimes while playing WoW, which is really bad in a battle, trust me. The system logs say it's the SATA driver. It's a little early for the hard drive to be failing, so I'm guessing the SATA drivers that shipped caused bad writes to the disk and now that the drivers are fixed, it's not reading those bad writes correctly. I figured what we needed to do is roll back to the factory install (easy to do with a Dell, just boot from the restore partition) and then restore from a backup. So that's what I did.

 

Well, it's not quite as easy as it sounds. I did a full backup using the Microsoft backup tool built into Vista to a network hard drive. Once that was done, I reformatted and put the factory image on the primary partition. Then I ran the restore from the network. After a reboot, voila! None of the applications were installed and nothing worked the way it did before the re-image. Well, I guess I can chalk that one up to my own stupidity, but I don't want to have that happen again. I need to find a backup and restore tool that will do the registry information as well as all the applications. I need it to be able to work to restore to a different drive geometry just in case I need to move someone's applications from one computer to another (which I will because my tablet is being recycled down the line). I am willing to accept any suggestions, I-told-you-so's and any other pokes you want to give me. Oh, and it needs to be cheap (which should go without saying in this economy).

 

Let the search begin!