Sorry for the delayed reply, as I made some tests. 1) Making a system backup image of my C drive (including the recovery partition) to an external hard drive takes about 30 minutes. This is with my MBAM Pro, WinPatrol Plus, and anti-virus all running in real-time, with no other programs running, and my fast cable internet connection intact. Obviously the size of the backup, the CPU speed and your hardware will all affect this time. I keep my computer on 24/7, and schedule these image backups in the wee hours when I'm not using the PC.  Now I have a fairly fast CPU and lots of RAM, so I would recommend you not power down your hard drive after only 15 minutes when a system image backup is planned. Powering down your monitor should not affect the backup, as long as the hard drive is still working. Almost all my backup images were made with the monitor off. 2) As far as I know, there is no need to disconnect from the internet, or to stop your AV or MBAM Pro from updating during the imaging process. I never have taken these measures, and was able to restore a backup system image on more than one occasion. At worst, I suppose you might lose any current definition updates, which could easily be corrected by running a manual update of  MSE or MBAM Pro. 3) I just restored my system from an external HD image I just created using Windows 7 backup. The prompt said it "might take from a few minutes to a few hours". It took about 35 minutes for me, and as far as I can tell, all files and programs were restored intact. This was without stopping my AV or  MBAM Pro. I applaud your attempts to back up your system with an image. I think it the easiest way to recover from significant malware infection. A system image, of course, is frozen to the time you make it. Anything added or created subsequently will be lost with an image restore.  I find that a weekly image backup works in practice. Any important files  I create between backups, I save to a flash drive.
              Hello                  My Brother-in-Law has asked me to help him make a system image of his new computer. It is a Dell Inspiron 660, running Windows 7 Home Prem., MSE, WinPatrol Plus, and MBAM Pro, and it has all the important updates installed. We will be using the Windows built in image maker and putting the image onto an external hard drive. We have looked at tutorials on the internet on how to do this, but we would like to have some guidance on a couple of item's before we start.                  In Power Option's, he has the monitor set to go off in 10 min's. and the hard drive to turn off in 15 min's.. Do we need to set these to Never or will the hard drive activity that will occur during the image making process over ride these settings?                  Since MSE, WinPatrol Plus, and MBAM Pro all run in real time, should we disconnect from the internet, exit from WP. and MBAM, and turn off the real time protection in MSE while making the image, and than re-do everything when done? If we left them running in real time, could they do something like checking for new definition updates, that could corrupt the image?                   All help would be very much appreciated.                                                            LKW198                      
Making a system image