Image your system with free Macrium

Hello
I am a new member and my knowledge is limited. However I have recently started using a new (partly new) desktop with WIN 7. I have followed advice from this forum and used free Macrium 5.1 and practiced making a little test image and then restoring it onto a test partition as suggested by whs. I have also made a Windows PE Macrium disk, and I downloaded the 1.7GB WAIK My computer is working perfectly, as far as I know, but I would like to have confidence in my bootable recovery disk, and would like to test it but do not want to mess up my desktop. I have another desktop that has a serviceable WINXP OS in it, but I don't want to mess that up either! I have a small friendly computer shop nearby. Perhaps I should ask them to test my disk. On further thinking I have the official MS setup disk as used by the professional who set up my computer so that must work. If I had some sort of complete failure so that the computer would not run at all could I just boot from my WIN 7 install disk then when the bare minimum OS was available use a recent image of the OS to restore back to full working condition? Any helpful comments appreciated

Thanks. Yes of course the WIN PE CD is not uniquely mine. I could just make another, as I have laptops, but I haven't tested it. The test I did was to use the Macrium program on my computer (on C Drive) to make an image of some data on a test partition on the data drive. The image was saved on my backup drive. The test partition was wiped clean then restored successfully, as you suggested I am sure. But I haven't tested the Rescue DVD. In the years I used WIN XP I used the Windows backup facility several times, successfully, but the equivalent on WIN 7 gave me trouble and no confidence so I am new to images Macrium and apart from my test have never used them. If my computer software became completely scrambled and would not start what is the first thing to do? Should I put in my WIN PE CD and hope it works or just wearily get out the WIN 7 install disk? Being a virgin in these matters I don't know what happens when you put in a bootable disk such as the rescue disk or Install disk. Will it politely ask me what I want to do or will it just empty (format) C drive and start creating a new setup from scratch?

I have looked carefully at the beginning of that YouTube video. So that is what you should see if your OS was not functioning and you booted from the WinPE disk? That is re-assuring, but suppose I put the recovery disk in my fully functioning computer now and restarted it. Could I run the program until it got to Restore Summary and then click on Cancel rather than Finish and not have made any changes. I am sorry if this is obvious to everyone except me! If I could test the disk in that way it would give a more comfortable feeling
Thanks for your patience

Thanks again. I will try that this evening