When launched, Drive Image 7 was a PowerQuest product, but earlier this year that company was acquired by Symantec, so this product and its well-known partner, Partition Magic, are now both available from the home of Norton products.

Installation is a bit more involved than with some other utilities, as you need to install a copy of Microsoft's .NET framework if it's not already on your system. While this is all handled pretty painlessly, it takes quite a while. You must have at least 256MB of available memory, too.

Drive Image 7 provides all the basic functions you would expect of this kind of utility, and can handle them all from within Windows. You can create a drive image, restore it again or extract files from it one-by-one, as you need them.

You can also create a copy of your hard drive onto another drive, ideal when upgrading as the drives don't have to be the same size. Should you need to run Drive Image without access to Windows, you can run from a boot disk using the PowerQuest Recovery Environment (PQRE).

You can schedule back-up jobs within Drive Image 7, so images can be created automatically, but there's no facility for incremental back-up, so you may need substantial storage space if you're going to maintain several images in a grandparent, parent, child sequence. To help with this, DriveImage 7 offers three levels of compression, from around 30 percent to something over 50 percent.

Drive Image 7 only runs under Windows 2000 and XP. An earlier version of the program, Drive Image 2002, is supplied in the box for Windows 98 and Me. However, important features of the new software, such as the ability to backup to DVD and external devices, are only available in the newer version.