As of Win7, the trick is to image your boot drive. Control panel / backup and restore / create a system image.
You’ll need an external drive a bit larger than the part of your boot drive you’re actually using.
When done select "create a system boot disk", which can either burn a boot CD/DVD for you or (I think) setup a USB drive.

If/when your boot drive fails it’s actually pretty easy to get back to where you were.

Small business owners just figure they are too small to have to worry about Microsoft coming after them. And home users don’t bother with reading the EULA anyway.

I do believe that with the price point of Windows 8 being as low as it is, there should be no excuse for anyone pirating Windows 8, unless they are just trying to "stick it to the man." It is not as pricey as previous versions of Windows were and I think that’s because Microsoft looked at the numbers, realized that people pirate software because they think it’s too expensive and then they lowered the price to a point that makes it a little easier on the wallet while still making money for Microsoft.

To add to this article, and touch on the "any system would have this problem for a restore" comments…

During one of my last dealings with Microsoft, I was purchasing a batch of new computers for the organization and had planned on getting one setup, sysprepping it, and then imaging the drive in order to have all of the others up in minutes. However in the process, I found out that it is illegal (in violation of license terms) to clone/image a Windows OEM version – so no quick and easy backups for easy restoration!!! If you want to image Windows machines, you need a Volume license… which are pretty costly, and they certainly don’t give you a discount if you buy 5, 10, or 20 licenses. The problem is that this is a full Windows Pro volume license, and is expensive, and NOT a Windows OEM license upgrade. So you don’t need to have already purchased Windows… however you can’t [easily] actually buy most computers WITHOUT Windows – which is completely stupid for enterprise machines where you will have to buy volume liceneses anyway. It boils down to the fact that they are selling businesses two different Windows licenses per machine… and small businesses or home users content with OEM (Home or Pro) are in breach of terms if they use disk imaging to backup their system.

That is pretty much the same imaging system that enterprises use to install computers, the one that can do many computers using multicast, scheduled without any human intervention, bare hooking up the hardware to power and network.

At least you got to get a technician on site to replace the motherboard and HD.

With Apple and even with a care pack, I still didn’t get a technician for a 2500 USD Apple pro. I called them, told them the GPU was broken, but some 20 year old obviously believed the customer didn’t know what he was talking about. So there we went, first repair permissions which took a good part of 7 hours. The next day it was on to a reinstall of Leopard and applications, which again took the best part of the working day. Then on the third, the apple representative finally was convinced it wasn’t some software or configuration problem. So I was told to go to the nearest Apple care center (or whatever name they used, could be service center, I forgot).

Of course I protested and told them to send a technician, or simply a replacement nivdea gpu, because there was no doubt it was indeed the GPU that was broken, but no I needed to take the heavy box into my car, drive an hour to the service center and explained to them what the problem was and what had been done about the problem previously.

Now after another five (5) working days, they called me to tell me the mac had been repaired. So back in the car, and towards the service center, where a technician (and the report I got) indeed told me the GPU had been replaced !

The user concerned couldn’t use this expensive machine for 9 ! Working days and had to make due with some laptop, which lacked some of the applications she relied upon to do her daily job.

This is why you don’t see many Macs in enterprises.

Regarding copy protection, that shouldn’t be any issue, especially since product keys are inserted into the bios nowadays, so activation should be fully automatic.

[WM: There are lots of reasons you don’t find Macs in a lot of companies. It mostly has to do with a critical software component that is only available for Windows. Windows support at the enterprise level also is completely different than what end users can expect. Copy protection also goes away. I fully appreciate that Microsoft has excellent tools available for these organizations. My staff used them for years. As for the Mac environment, Apple’s backup mechanism is just as lousy as Microsoft’s. Use Carbon Copy Cloner which makes the recovery process described in the article a no-brainer for anyone regardless of skill level and regardless of the number of systems being maintained. All you need is a $100 USB drive.]

http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-create-a-system-image-in-windows-8/

[WM: And have you tested it with reliable results? Not saying it doesn’t work but if a system can’t find drivers on its Windows boot DVD, I’d be surprised if you had any better luck with a backup image that also had to rely on Windows to boot successfully. And, again, there is the copy protection problem once you swap out a motherboard. But to each his own.

Most folks always believe their solutions are the greatest until they fail. The true test is what happens next. 🙂 ]

I use Microsoft products willingly and ably. All of the issues people complain about, I’ve never experienced. I have used many PCs. I have customers who are using many PCs. I know that this doesn’t mean there aren’t issues, but if people are having hardware problems and they blame those problems on Microsoft, that’s just not right.

How would you feel in this scenario: someone builds a PIAF machine and gets it up and running and everything is working fine, but a week (or a year) later, their hard drive crashes. They start cursing PIAF and Linux because the motherboard had a problem. Sound familiar? It’s what you are doing in this article, except instead of running Linux, you’re running Windows.

[WM: As noted in the article, all of the diagnostics indicated that there was no hardware failure. And Dell has very sophisticated diagnostic tools built into the BIOS of their high end machines. Out of an abundance of caution, Dell replaced both the drive and the motherboard anyway. Who could complain?

The point of the article was not to bash Microsoft. The point was to document how complex it is to recover from a catastrophic failure on a Windows machine. If an expert spends two hours to diagnose a problem with Windows, there’s a bigger problem IMHO. As with your experience, we’ve had dozens of Windows machines that have never failed, but that’s really quite beside the point.]

It is the newest laptop – a lenovo ideapaf U410 with secure boot that scares me because I just cant get clonezilla to boot off – disabling secure boot / legacy mode etc just doesnt work and I dont have the time to figure out why…

Thx for all you do