Installation
Here's a picture of the box:
Lovely. Here's a picture of inside the box:
Despite a marketing-heavy cover on the box, inside all you get is the True Image 10 CD, a quickstart guide and a registration card for the company who publishes True Image here in the UK, Computrolley. True Image can also be a digital purchase; downloaded rather than shipped as a CD. Either way, if you lose your copy of True Image, all you need to do is login to your Acronis Account and re-download it, so it's highly recommended that you register the product on the Acronis website.
The CD serves not only as the installation disc, but as a recovery CD. Boot from it and it'll take you into the Linux version of True Image, should the system not be in the mood for booting from fixed disk. More on that later.
Installation
Click next a few times, reboot and True Image 10 Home Edition is installed. There isn't much to configure during installation, but one of the optional components is support for BartPE.
BartPE is a fantastic toolkit for creating a 'pre-installation environment' from a Windows XP CD. It creates a bootable iso (CD/DVD image) which provides a Windows XP environment that runs without requiring the hard disk. Extra software can be loaded onto it to increase functionality.
Given that this reviewer started using Bart's tools in days of yore to create network-enabled DOS floppy disks, it's good to see Acronis acknowledge the usefulness of BartPE and provide a means of integrating its software into it.