I see your point, with virtualbox there is no danger of messing up the vista install. It would be a bit ugly if things went wrong because most of these machines do not come with restore disks. FWIW the last time I fixed a gateway box under warrenty they sent me a set of real restore disks. Perhaps there is a way to create them form the backup partition.
regarding the virtualisation tools, virtualbox (have to market it, made by my company) is a great tool, you can create virtual machine install anything you want inside (for e.g. windows xp + mplab + c18 SE + picc demo + hitech c demo+ boost c demo+ ... + ...) then you burn that image to a CD and distribute to students (there is here issue of XP licence, donno how that is handled I use corporate licence that does not have to be activated) .. anyhow, they just need to install virtualbox on the host operating system (osx or windows or solaris) and copy the image from the cd ... they have "ready to run" development environment set by you with all the tools and examples they need ... if they mess up something, delete something, break something, just remove the image and copy the "original" one from the cd (or dvd, depends on how big the image is
)
it is great tool for testing too, I for example have "plan/naked/fresh" images of "all" operating systems I want to test something on (vanila 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, 98se, nt3.5, nt351, nt4, nt4sp3, nt4sp6, w2k, w2ksp1.... xp, xpsp1.. xpsp3, vista, vistasp1... linux fc1..fc9, rhel3..rhel5 ...) and when I want to test if some app install's ok, or run's ok on "blank" system, I start the virtualbox, run the app, make it "work", remove the image from the hdd, copy the next os from dvd, start virtualbox ....
I have to mention that there is vmware server too, it is also free, it also does the same thing but does not work properly nor have free server for osx
in regards to backups, you can use acronis tools to backup your hole drive or separate partitions to a remote location (other drive, network drive ...)
EDIT: forgot to mention one great ability of virtualbox, that is USB pass trough... what does that do .. well, you connect pickit2/junebug on your host computer (let say vista x64 without drivers for your pickit2) and tell virtualbox to "pass trough" that usb to client os, you will be able to access the pickit2/junebug from the winxp running inside the virtualbox just like it was a real computer with pickit2 attacked. I tried this on my laptop (macbook pro, osx10.5) running winxp inside virtualbox and was able to use pickit2 without a problem to program and debug a pic
- I was unable to do that with vmware
EDIT: download link:
Downloads - VirtualBox