I'm putting together a little productivity workstation for a friend of mine. He currently has a single-core Sempron box, which is slow even for the minimal things he does, like web browsing and MS Office. I got a little dual core Dell secondhand and I've installed Windows 7 (he hates Windows 8/Windows 10) and everything runs great. However he has been known to pick up some malware/bloat off the internet, and his usual fix is to restore the PC to factory defaults using the little OEM CD. Problem is since this computer originally had Vista and I'm the one who put 7 on it, there is no magic "restore" CD for it. I'd like to build in some kind of functionality like this for him, preferably that doesn't require my assistance.
Do you guys think Windows built-in System Restore is adequate? Are there other options (maybe something involving an automated CloneZilla-ish thing)? I don't want to get too complicated.
try macrium, its imaging software. you could partition off what you need to save the image on the system disk, or if possible put the image on a second disk / external
it would be a safer option when compared to system restore.
having the image on the same drive will make this more complex to restore, they will likely need to use clonezilla
i found a thread on scripting clonezilla, it looks a bit rough but it would work.
System Restore creates snapshots of the Windows registry and certain files periodically that is meant to create system stability in case software inadvertently messes it up. However, System Restore is helpless against overt attempts at messing with Windows (malware) as that is not what is was designed to do.
For that, a more stable solution is Imaging technology that takes a snapshot of the entire disk (either file-by-file, or byte-per-byte) to restore from later.
For Windows 7, certain editions have this functionality included (byte-per-byte). Start menu -> Maintenance -> Backup and Restore -> Create a system image
Then just boot from WindowsRE (the recovery disk) to start the recovery process. This is the process I use personally.
For third party alternatives, Macrium Reflect, as per kenkoda's suggestion, is the best idea.
Another third-party alternative is the OEM Recovery Partition project by Anarethos on the digital life forums. It works as well as Macrium but requires [re-]installing Windows in the way the software requires since it places the restore partition at the start. Macrium and the Windows image restore are more flexible and allow the recovery partition to be placed at the end of the drive post-install.
Another third-party alternative is Clonezilla. Last time I checked it was fully command line and hence not user friendly.
Looks like the built-in Windows 7 "System Image" tool is exactly what I need. I'll post an update later but it sounds perfect, and from what I've read it works on 7 Home Premium. Thanks!