I had my first disk failure this week of my Windows 7 laptop hard drive. Fortunately I’ve been using Windows 7 Backup, and all I had to do was plug in the external USB drive with my backups to another machine, boot off the Windows 7 installation CD, and select ‘Repair…’ using the latest system image from the USB drive. Even restoring a system image from a Dell Latitude to a Toshiba Tecra (with the same sized drive and dual core x64 CPU) was painless, all the necessary drivers were changed automatically with no fuss. The only problem was reestablishing trust with a Windows domain, which was worked around by changing the computer name and re-adding to the domain. The default Windows 7 Backup configuration is to create a system image and backup all files in Libraries, which works just fine for me.