Office reinstall after system recovery

[Kristy]

My laptop's been acting up and I've been wanting to run a system recovery to
restore it to its factory settings, but I've been worried that I won't be
able to reinstall Microsoft Office again. I'm a student and bought the
'Ultimate Steal' package of Office 2007 last year. Other than my laptop I
installed it on my home PC fine. I tried to install it on a third computer,
but was told that using my authorization code 2 times was the limit. So now
that my system's going to be wiped, I'm worried it won't let me install the
software back on my laptop, thinking it's another computer or something. Does
anyone know what will happen if I try? Does Windows lose all memory of having
this software installed and won't recognize it as being reinstalled? Please
help me out! I'd like to know what to do before I make such a drastic change
and hopefully won't have to re-buy the software. Thanks!

 

[Earle Horton]

There should be no problem installing multiple times on the same computer.

You might think of getting an external hard drive to do an image backup of
your system before you make any irrevocable changes. They are cheap now.

Earle

 

[Kristy]

Oh ok, good. I wasn't sure how much internal memory would remain, so I was
worried it wouldn't recognize the software at all and think it was a
different computer altogether.
I actually do already have an external hard drive which I've been saving
backups of my files and such on manually. My laptop's a Vaio, and for some
reason the system recovery wizard wants me to use DVD-Rs and a CD-R to save
my recovery backup files to. (Not sure if that's the case for all computers
running Windows XP or not). What do you mean by 'image backup'?

 

[DL]

If you use the win default backup tool, its v.old and was designed when
cd/dvd's were not available
Save the back up to hd , copy from hd to cd/dvd after

 

[Earle Horton]

Symantec Ghost or a similar program. It makes an "image copy" or "image
file", your choice, where you can clone you hard disk to another one, or
make a file you can use to restore it to an exact previous state. I am not
familiar with the system backup program in XP, because the copy of Symantec
Ghost that I have has worked fine for years.

Earle