Drive Imaging software?

Any ghost software will do this. You may find you will be backing up and spanning multiple DVD's. Tricky to Restore!

XP has its own backup built in. In accessories and system tools. This isn't as bad as some people think. I have never had a problem when restoring the full backup like you are sugesting however it lacks usability if you want to resore just part a backup.

There is a wizard and its easy to use. You can choose data, data and settings, all info on PC and it creates a recovery disk incase of major failure as well as a custom backup option. I think this will serve you just fine. You can choose where to backup the image aswell so network PC is fine.

Drawback is its not the fastest on the planet if you have lots to backup and I think you need a floppy drive to make a boot disk. To be honest I never tried to see if it can boot from CD instead. You could create the floppy and then make your own boot CD with the same info on.

In fact I had forgotten all about this feature and may even follow your example and make a recovery backup set myself. I havn't got a floppy since my floppy controller melted on my mobo but a USB floppy drive will work just as well.

Yeh I came accross that one in a review which marked it quite highly

Im gonna give them both a try to compare them, will reply back once I have tried them both to let people know how i found them both