Mike's questions

The standard laptop here is a Dell D600 with XP SP3, which came with an 80 GB drive originally. One of them was upgraded to a 160 GB internal drive. Ghost was used to transfer and expand the original installation to the upgraded drive. All was fine for a while. After some time, the computer boots to an empty text screen with a cursor in the upper-left corner. This is right after POST and before anything Windows-related happens. So, F8 didn't work, safe mode didn't work, and there was no Windows logo. FIXMBR, etc didn't always work. It was necessary to re-ghost the system from backup to recover it. In all cases, it happened after installing either a new or updated software such as Adobe, Picasa, etc. Installing the same software upgrade after re-Ghost is successful.

A virus scan does not show any abnormality. What to look for?

I'm looking at using Bitlocker on a new laptop. I have been using Acronis for full image backups; it would take me way too much time to reinstall and configure from scratch in the event of a stolen laptop. I would like to do periodic full system backups with daily incremental backups.

Acronis True Image treats Bitlocker images as black boxes; a backup is equal in size to the entire hard drive volume. An incremental backup of a Bitlocker image results again in a backup equal to the size of the entire hard drive.

Vista's "Complete PC Backup and Restore" is a bit clumsy in that it is difficult to restore the system to new hardware for the case of a lost / stolen laptop.

Does Windows 7 support Bitlocker using Complete PC Backup and Restore, and restore to replacement hardware?

How can incremental backups be performed with Bitlocker?