Best free imaging software?

LOL, you aren't familiar with the full feature comparison then, LOL.
LOL.

 

Why do I care? I didn't spend the money on it.

 

There's almost direct proportionality.

 

Does the UEFI/Legacy boot settings of the new computer have to match the UEFI/Legacy boot settings of the computer you took the Windows 8.1 image? (or for Linux)

 

Not necessarily. You can restore GPT to MBR and vice versa but then you would have to convert GPT to MBR and vice versa. If the OS didn't boot it would be a storage controller driver issue and drivers would need to be installed. You can use TBOSDT Pro to install drivers into a non booting OS.

 

I do a backup only once with Windows backup (after a clean install from an upgrade of the OS) so to me a 15mn difference doesn't matter much, i use RX after for testing/crash issues , far faster than any classic imaging solutions.

 

Is a computer's system recovery partition party to the imaging process?

 

Restore a snapshot from RX is less than a minute on my system. Creating one is around 30sec.

 

My system is at service centre & hence the late reply.Actually that was the reason I imaged the system drive.I was running my win 7 system for 5 years without any reinstall/restore.I never had a need to use imaging softeare as my data on other drive is backed up in simple copy operation to external hdd & I never faced virus/malware issues either.The only time I have to use imaging is when leaving system at service centre due to hardware failure which was the case this time.As such there is no point in me buying any imaging software.However I do look for reliability in an imaging software even if I use it once a year/few years because that in my opinion is the fundamental thing to look for in an imaging software.