Windows 7: Recovery from Image or b/u disk

Ah ... gotta love MS!
Didn't want MS Office on my new Win 7 laptop.
Tried many times to ask MS how to remove the 60day trial programs (ie Office)
but if you've ever tried to communicate with MS you'll understand why I gave up in disgust.



V.happy with Open Office and noticed the high volume of updates for MS Office -
such high volume can only indicate security issues etc and since I don't use Office thought - damn it, I'll uninstall and hopefully stop getting all these notices to update.

So I did.
The ususal way (Control Panel/Programs/Uninstall)
Well, that seemed painless.

Then noticed certain things not working (eg Soluto) .... hmmmm
turned out that unbeknowest to me I'd also uninstalled MS.NET Framework.
(Of course no mention of that where I uninstalled from).

Also ... can you believe all the MS Office Trial Programs are still in my Start/
All Programs list and they all still open. (I really don't care any more)

So ... as I'm on dial-up I can't d/load a new version of .NET but I do have
both an Image and a backup disk .... is it possible to recover .NET from
either of these?

You can't just pull the .NET out of a Image,there will be no Setup for the Framework..But if you restore the whole image you'll be exactly back to the point you made it and your .NET and all the dail-up setting will be restored.

Hi Zeplash,

you wrote have never had to do this ... how to do it? is this covered in the tutorials do y' know?

Recover System Image

But this assumes you made an image to begin with.

Did you accidentally delete the .NET Framework or are you saying it happened when you uninstalled the trial Office?

Only uninstalled those programs listed in 'Programs' as MS Office.
No other unistallations done. Certainly did not uninstall .NET deliberately,
so have assumed it was part of the MS Office programs.

I'm not sure what it looks like now but I deleted it at one stage (and subsequently installed a boxed retail version). There was one entry to uninstall:
Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007

This system came with Pro vers. and there was more than one
entry for MS Office.
_________________________
Let's forget recovery ... I can live without .NET meanwhile.

Perhaps more important is for me to understand Backup.
I made a b/up disk according to instuctions.
When I go to 'top up' so to speak ... the disk is rejected and the B/up will
not continue.
I made a new b/up disk in case the first disk had a corruption but same problem

So my questions about backup are:
a. what sort of disk do I use? RW or R
b. should I insert same disk when I want to 'top up' the backup?

I've used DVD +R in the distant past for backup.
Some people have problems with MS imaging & backup (2 seperate things!)
The problems seem to increase when they use DVDs - I haven't seen a concise reason yet.

I (& just about everyone else will) recommend:
1) Don't consider DVDs for MS file/folder backup or MS imaging. This goes for third party backup/imaging software.
2) Use a relatively cheap external USB HDD
3) Read some of the excellent tutorials provided on the forum. Then come back and ask questions.

If MS backup/imaging continues to be a problem for you then there are (free) third party software alternatives that are highly regarded by forum members.

Clearly you need DVDs for factory recovery, and the MS system repair disk.

Ok, thanks MJF but just one question:
are backups cumulative (ie create an initial b/up then add new files)?
or is each b/up an entire b/up?

To make sure we are talking about the same thing
"Backups" as I said before involve 2 distinct activities. Images which are snapshots of whole partitions which includes OS, programs, data etc.
File/Folder backups which essentially is your personal data plus whatever additional folders you nominate. What people often think of as backing up. These are incremental. But after certain periods of time and when you change backup location a new full backup will be created. You can view and manage these backup sets by deciding to delete old ones for space. You can go into the backups and pull out folders & files leaving the backup in place.