Old Backup discs can come in handy

Wanted to point out a situation where even older Paragon apps can be invaluable.

On a unusual project, getting an old win98 laptop running XP, I was saved by a Paragon Backup 8.5 CD I had held onto -- more recent versions of *nix [including those on more current Paragon boot discs] & WinPE-type discs were no good because of the tiny amount of system RAM & old [400 MHz] CPU.

FWIW the procedure I used -- which no doubt could be improved -- was to create a Windows VPC VM, install XP SP3 with all updates, strip files that weren't absolutely necessary, turn off all eye candy & extra services, test, & then outside Windows VPC mount the VHD, adjust the partition, & finally perform a partition backup using that Paragon CD. To perform the backup I attached the VHD to a VBox VM along with the CD, & using Paragon Backup 8.5 burned the backup directly to CD. The reason for the extra work in the VM was 1) I was afraid the laptop hdd would be too small to hold the setup & Windows files during install, & 2) as I later confirmed with additional hotfixes, I was afraid installing updates using that old CPU would take forever. As it worked out, after restoring the backup to the laptop I had to do a repair re-install, as the laptop wouldn't boot into safe mode, & I had to do a few more updates, removing a couple of hundred MB that they added.

The result runs well enough that I've ordered a RAM upgrade -- a whopping 128 MB to replace the 64 MB card in there now (it's the largest available) :-0 . And at the end of the day, by giving it another life browsing the web & running small apps, that's a little bit less in some toxic landfill.

 

The old discs were much faster for me.

 

That is one area where Paragon could improve their offering - the linux discs are not as widely compatible as they could be.

They work on most machines, but they are slow to load.