Hi, many applications are out there to do just what you're looking for using a very friendly interface. A very famous one is the Norton ghost. If you ask for my advice, these days portable/external USB hard drives are pretty cheap. Most of them come with a backup/image application already installed, plus, you save lots of space on your internal hard drive. Actually, I've just bought a 160Gb hard drive, Maxtor manufactured, just for this cause. It has already had a very friendly backup application on it.