Free or VERY CHEAP windows Imaging Programs and good Firefox plugins for antivirus

amateurhour

I'm looking for a good free or extremely cheap imaging program like Norton Ghost.

I need something that can take a full capture of a machine, that I can restore without having to re-install windows first (as is the case with ntbackup)

This is because I recently helped a friend overcome a nasty computer virus that I'd like to see him avoid in the future.

Also, he's jumping from IE to firefox and I'm looking for the best plugins for ad-block, and general security.

Thanks H/A!

bowen

Clonezilla is what I use.

Essee

The absolute best extension for security in Firefox is NoScript. You'll have to explain to him how to use it, but basically NoScript blocks ANY script from running in your browser by default, including malicious ones, so you are incredibly more secure. Instead, you selectively allow specific sites or parts of sites as needed, which is much better than the default behavior of browsers (allowing any script that wants to be running to run). A few things are allowed by default (Youtube, Hotmail, etc.), but he'll have to unblock sites as he visits them if he's having trouble using them. Once he gets used to it, he'll be insanely more secure for not too much work. Nothing gets through unless you explicitly allow it. This also has the side-effect of blocking all those annoying Flash ads that are out there (and a few other ad frames that use scripts).

Otherwise, I don't personally use it, but my fiance uses AdBlock Plus, as do a lot of other people on the forums here, for blocking ads. I'm mostly just concerned about scripts, not necessarily the ads themselves, so I don't have it installed.

amateurhour

I'll definitely recommend noscript, and start using it myself for that matter.

Also thanks for clonezilla. Looking at that, and a few others.

Thanks!

Nibble

Acronis True Image has a trial version, but you can use it to burn a boot CD that has no trial period. It also supports newer high-capacity 2.5" drives, which may be an issue if you use it on a laptop with a drive larger than 640GB.

If you're using Windows 7, it has this function built-in, so you don't need to use any third-party software.

Judge Joe Brown

Clonezilla can be clunky sometimes and isn't quite as good as Acronis at managing partitions and physical disk space. Acronis is pretty brain-dead easy to use too.

Grobian

DriveSnapshot is a very small tool. It runs from everywhere and will image a complete drive to a single file. It can do some advanced stuff and has a command line interface, so you can also easily automate it if you want.