I'm running about a 6 year old XP box here that is left on all the time. For the second time, my bacon has been saved by having images of my hard drive. I'm using a product by Acronis called True Image (I know there are others) and it has worked flawlessly both times, just replace the dead drive, boot from the rescue CD that contains the program and start restoring. You can even change your partition sizes as you restore (I went from a 320 GB drive to a 500GB drive). The company maintains support forums where questions are generally answered fairly quickly and also offer a pay per incident option if you need quicker service. I have no connection with Acronis other than being a very satisfied user