AlanP

I have recently purchased a Dell XPS laptop with Vista Home Premium. I
have already in the past 6 week had to restore the system back to it's
factory setting. It's a pain going through installing anew all the software
& data that I work with. I can get by with the data as I used to use XXCopy
(on my old XP machine) but now use Robocopy, which operates slightly
differently but achieves the same ends.
My problem & question is how can I backup the software including Vista so
that I can restore back to my latest working state?
AlanP