LAN crash and/or hard drive backup

Dear uh... /comp/?,

I just spent almost 12 hours reformatting and reinstalling because of some bullshit LAN driver crash. Whenever I enter standby on my laptpo with my ethernet cord unplugged, my "Local Area Connection" is gone from my Network Connections folder and Windows finds new hardware for "Ethernet Controller" telling me it's not confiugured properly. Reinstalling drivers doesn't work, System restore doesn't work, and it's persisted through TWO reformats with the third correcting the problem. I've shipped back to the manufacturer twice and both times I was told that the error was duplicated but intallation of drivers fixed it. Obviously this shouldn't be happening, but I've resigned myself to sccepting it at least until summer, when I don't have online classes. Help me fix this problem, or explain what's happening and I'll love you forever.

tl;dr or tc;fy (too complicated; fuck yourself): Please reccommend some good hard drive image/backup software? I got a Maxtor drive, but I refuse to install the 600megs of propietary bloatware bullshit on their CD unless absolutely necessary. Thanks for reading.

-- Anonymous

PS - 12 hours of clicking through setup utilities and license agreements on 2 hours of sleep > typo-free posts.

tl;dr
tc;fy
The fuck does this shit mean?

>>1
I believe Norton Ghost is the traditional Winders tool for making hard disk images. I used it once a long time ago and it seemed to work well. If you're not in the mood to download that off thepiratebay or whatever, try booting a GNAA/Lunix livecd and learning how to use the dd command. Very powerful and not even hard to use unless you have a morbid fear of reading manpages.

>>3 is stupid.

>>3
Fuck knows... he should have written the meaning after in brackets or something.

>>3
>>5
You're not fooling anyone.

>>6

Failed to see sarcasm :(

Look for Hiren's boot cd on your favourite torrent site.  60ish megs but bootable with a whole bunch of HD/partition recovery/cloning programs.  Also has a mini-Win98 too.