Image your system with free Macrium

Bellzemos said:

Another thing concerning speed. As I said, I made a full disk image (hidden system partition + C partition + D partition), 193 GB alltogether. So I created the image on an external USB 3.0 HDD and it took 1,5 hour to do it. Transfer rates were from 43 MB/s to 35 MB/s when writing to the external HDD. Isn't that kind of slow for an USB 3.0 drive?

That seems about right to me.

I can image/restore at ~3 GB/minute to ~4 GB/minute using internal HDDs.
External HDDs will be slower.

whs said:

I also made a rescue CD - Win PE, 64-bit version (does that mean I can't use that CD to restore a 32-bit computer?),

That is correct. But most PCs can do 64bit today. Only very old PCs may be 32bit only.

In my view that is an exceptionally dangerous assumption.

A 32 bit application can run on a 64 bit Windows 7 system.
A 32 bit WinPE can be loaded into 64 bit wide RAM and restore an image read from a USB serial external drive to restore through a SATA or IDE interface to your internal drive.

A 64 bit application uses 64 bit wide RAM and uses 64 bit wide instruction codes to can reach beyond the addressing limits of a 32 bit system.

64 bit WinPE needs only a few hundred MB of RAM to execute,
but has the capability of addressing more than 4 GB of RAM.

It is more than probable that when Macrium runs on a full blown live 64 bit Windows system it will use 64 bit wide instruction codes,
and when Macrium creates WinPE it is unlikely to restrict itself to 32 bit wide instruction codes,
and your 64 bit WinPE CD will be unable to load 64 bit instructions into a 32 bit wide RAM.

What is safe to assume is that a 32 bit WinPE will successfully restore an image to a 64 bit system.
I have actually used an old WinPE created under 32 bit XP to restore 64 bit Windows 7 images.

Right click on it and see whether the path is C:\Windows\System32\wbem - if yes, then it is OK and legit.

No idea - and it is not really 'running'. It is just sitting there doing no harm. Why would you want to muck around with it.

When you eliminate it, the best that can happen is that you save a few bytes in RAM - the worst that can happen is that you brick your system.

lehnerus2000 said:

Bellzemos said:

Another thing concerning speed. As I said, I made a full disk image (hidden system partition + C partition + D partition), 193 GB alltogether. So I created the image on an external USB 3.0 HDD and it took 1,5 hour to do it. Transfer rates were from 43 MB/s to 35 MB/s when writing to the external HDD. Isn't that kind of slow for an USB 3.0 drive?

That seems about right to me.

I can image/restore at ~3 GB/minute to ~4 GB/minute using internal HDDs.
External HDDs will be slower.

An update on speed.
I just imaged 47GB to one of my external USB3 WD 1 TB MyBook Essentials HDDs and it took 10min 21 secs. Also, the ext HDD had ~230MB free. If the HDD had been empty the image time would have been lower.

That is about in-line with the times I am seeing => 7.4 min for 38.4GB. But we have our systems on SSDs. That may make a difference.

Bellzemos said:

There's a thing though - since I used Reflect I have WmiPrvSE.exe running in the background all the time. I never had that before. I googled it and it says it's a process that's used in the enterprise environment - but I am a home user. What's that about? Can I disable it?

I don't have that service (WmiPrvSE.exe) running constantly on my PC.

I get a few instances (4 - 7) of WmiPrvSE.exe, if I run hardware monitors (e.g. Speccy or SIW.exe).