How to backup system state only

i have Win7 (64) preinstalled on an Acer Aspire notebook. I've been looking high and low for a way to backup just my system state, the way I used to be able do in Windows XP. There was even a guided tutorial to help you do it on the MS web site. The resultant file was much smaller than a partition backup and was often more useful for disaster recovery than the simple restore point recovery. It only took a few minutes to create. It seems NTBackup is gone. Is there any way to do what ntbackup used to do?

you may like to have look at those tutorials:
System Image Recovery
Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup
Restore Backup User and System Files


Acer Empowering Technology > Acer eRecovery Management.
Acer Support - Answers, E-Mail, Chat - How can I restore my computer with the backup discs I created?

Manual how to use Acer eRecovery Management here:
ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/empowering_technology/NB%20ET2%20user's%20guide/Acer%20eRecovery%20Management%20English.pdf

Thank you for the reply. I looked at the three links but saw no mention of backing up just the system state; i.e. System State is backup file included:

The System Registry
The COM+ Class Registry Database
Boot and System Files
Windows File Protection System Files
Active Directory Database (Domain Controller)
SYSVOL Directory (Domain Controller)
Certificate Services Database (Certificate Server)
Cluster Service Configuration Information (Failover Cluster)
IIS Metadirectory (Web Application Server)

What I did was to download and install Erunt as can be found in Vista and is available online and said to be compatible with Win7. It seems similar. If not, please advise.