Like, Aspirin, Dumpster, or Google, the word “Ghost” in computer terms is a proper noun (and verb for that matter) which has achieved a level of popularity which relegated it to generic use to define an entire class of its peers, like has happened with pain relievers, trash containers and search engines. Ask any computer geek and they’ll tell you that “a Ghost” is an exact copy of a hard drive or a partition on a hard drive. And “to Ghost” means to make such a copy. Some of these geeks if they’ve been around long enough might even be able to tell you that Ghost is a registered trademark of Symantec and before them, the Norton Utilities software company. (Now that I think about it, “Norton” used to refer to the category of computer software diagnostic tools back in they day. e.g. “Hey man, you got Norton or something on a floppy?” “Yeah, I got MSD right here.”)

Well I just found that Acronis is making version 7.0 of their True Image software free for home use. As you might guess by now, Acronis is a ghosting tool. Version 7 is an older version, they want you to buy version 10 for $30, but v7 seems to be very capable. It lets you do a ton of things including making bootable recovery CDs, incremental image “backups”, and more. Worth checking out. Big question mark that I have right now is if it will work with Vista.