Recently, Sony raised the prices on its current HMD products by about five percent. We have heard a rumor that the video cable would be lengthened from one meter to two meters, but we don't know when that will happen, if indeed it is in the works. Lengthening the cable is said to involve engineering changes beyond just adding cable. CGSD News readers came through with a number of tips related to the thorny problem of backing up NT systems. The top recommendation, from several readers, was Norton Ghost.
Ghost does seem to work in a rather spooky way.
You cannot use a writable CD or Jazz drive, the second drive has to be a real hard drive. A more expensive edition allows the second drive to be on a network. Our programming staff says that dual boot machines tend to be a pain, but it works for our reader. Yet another possibility is a RAID array that writes to two disks in parallel. Prices have dropped to a few hundred dollars now, so that may be a viable approach.