Vista Backups, in Virtual PC/Server Format
I hate doing disaster recovery on an XP
box.
But Vista has a separate backup routine that
backs up an entire system. It is called CompletePC, this backs up the whole
system to a VHD file.
That's a "virtual hard drive" for Microsoft's desktop virtual machine
manager, Virtual PC.
You can use something called the Windows Recovery
Environment to restore that VHD to a new piece of hardware or, potentially, you
could just mount it as a virtual system. Pretty cool.