When I receive a copy of a new computer program, I read the manual through three times. It took several years for me to recognize the importance of doing that. Drive Image 4 tells you to disable your anti-virus program and close any programs you may have running before you attempt to use Drive Image 4.

With this program you may

1. Set scheduled backups.
2. Drive Image will create image files on floppies, hard disks, CDR drives, and other removable drives.
3. Interestingly enough, you may image more than one hard drive at once, if you have several hard disks in your computer.
4. You may save an image to a hidden partition.
5. In advanced options, you may split an image file to cover more than one removable drive, such as floppy disks.
6. You may make an image copy of one or all the partitions on your disk. This means you may have an exact copy of your partition or partitions transferred to a CD - R or a CD-RW drive. Now if you need to replace a file or two, you may do so from the CD ROM or another partition on your hard disk.
7. Datakeeper 4.1 is included with the Drive Image 4 program. It continuously monitors your system for changes. You specify which files or folders to monitor and then selectively they can be restored.
8. Drive Image 4 will create images on hidden FAT, FAT32, and NTFS partitions. You can check the integrity of the Image files. It works with Windows ME.

PowerQuest Corporation P.O. Box 1911 Orem, Utah 84059-1911; Phone 801-226-8941; http://www.powerquest.com.

When I buy a new computer, I add a second hard drive right away. I also split up my main disk into partitions. Splitting your main disk allows you to set up your programs so that your spreadsheets, letters and databases are all "saved" to one partition. This allows for easy backups, not for the main programs but just for your work. Other people prefer to have one large C drive.

After I set up the new computer and load all my programs, I image copy to the second hard drive. This means that if I make a mistake or if a file is corrupted, I can simply switch over to the second hard drive and go right on with my work. Then, at my leisure, I can image copy from my stored hard disk back to my original disk and be right back where we were when we set up the new computer: with my regular work on my original disk, and with the image backup copy to go to any time trouble develops. This is neat for another reason.

Sometimes, we use a lot of programs and erase them, we think. However, Windows keeps some of the snippets and so the whole computer slows down after a time. Formatting the c:\ drive and image copying it back will close out all those snippets, and I believe my computer runs faster.

I have used PartitionMagic for a long time and Drive Image since Version 1. I am impressed with the people at PowerQuest because the programs work as advertised, and they are not user unfriendly as some programs are. Using DriveImage you can restore your hard disk programs if you accidentally erase some or all. Using Lost and Found, another PowerQuest program, I have gone into hard disks we thought were beyond further use and I have taken off programs and whole sections of data and then deep fixed the bad hard disk.

If you get the latest copy of PartitionMagic, and also DriveImage, you have the manuals that you need to easily understand how hard drives work, and how you can best use them. u