The Shrine

This is a somewhat advanced topic but I'm hoping someone has done this before...

I have a laptop that I use for basic stuff, but mostly for screwing around as a test machine. I'd like to install Windows 7 on it, for example, but I don't want to destroy everything saved on the HDD, I'd like to be able to revert later. What I'm looking to do then is basically be able to make a backup image of my laptop that I could restore from later, either via DVD-R or by network shares. Has anyone done this before or know what to use for a home user? I've done it at work but those were corporate licensed applications

My friend and I just did this for his PC. There are a bunch of free apps that do this. We used Macrium Reflect which is a disk imaging tool. We tried restoring it onto an older PC and we discovered that this one wouldn't see the images on a DVD. It could only see them on a disk partition. So you'd need to copy the backup onto another drive or logical partition to restore.