Microsoft includes a full backup and restore utility with Windows 7. Follow this guide to see how it works.

On PC I havent used anything so I'm open for suggestions. But before I purchase any software, how good is Windows 7's own backup utility? Is it fast and most importantly reliable?

Out of the box, Windows 7 can't access backup files created with Windows XP. Fortunately, there's a free utility that should be able to restore your stuff.

Researcher Matt Nelson disclosed another Windows UAC bypass, this one abusing the sdclt.exe backup and restore utility to execute a payload without triggering an alert.

I want to use the built-in backup tool to create a system image, and the space estimate it gives me seems to be just the total space used on the partition. But there's no need to save pagefile.sys ...