Image your system with free Macrium

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Well, I always run MR while AVAST! free is running. Usually, Media Monkey and calibre are also running; often, an e-book is open in calibre's e-book viewer. That's never been a problem before. I have no idea why Speccy would crash MR.

I usually run Winamp and I don't disable Avast or Process Explorer either. :)
My images have almost always worked (there was one exception - I had a MBR glitch).

I suspect Speccy needs to directly interrogate the HDD controller to retrieve the info (i.e. SMART and temperature data).
I doubt that AV and media players need to do that (i.e. they rely on the OS to provide them with data).

It should be possible to prove that by using a different system info program.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they would all crash the OS.

As an aside, I don't know why Windows doesn't have a temperature/voltage monitor built into the OS.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

The curious thing is that I have Coretemp running all the time.

I would've expected that to cause the same sort of issues.

Perhaps it only happens if something tries to access the SMART data.

It was my impression Macrium takes a static snapshot of the partition at the time the image is created.

Maybe it's an issue with Lady Fitzgerald's hardware/software setup.

Does anyone have a test machine that they can use to replicate the issue?

My Macrium needs updating, Installed Version: 5.2.6314.0 latest Version is Macrium Reflect 5.2.6348 -

So can I download and overwrite or do I have to uninstall the old Version ?, any advice appreciated :)

Not sure how it works on the free version Steph. The paid version prompts to download a patch. You just press the download button and it does it all for you. You may need to use Other tasks->Check for updates to get the prompt.