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Reviews For Casper XP version 3.0
Average Rating: 4 Based On 1 Reviews


Date: May 31, 2006, 6:58:33pm


user: jobhunter
computer: Pentium 4 3Ghz HT
operating system: XP Pro SP2
screen reader: Jaws 6.2
rating: 4
comments: Everyone who uses a computer should know that the hard drives contained within their system will fail at some point. And Murphy’s Law says that they will fail at the most inappropriate time possible. If you backup your data on a regular basis, you are ahead of the game. Now, think of all the time that you have spent installing all the software you use and all the many configuration tweaks that you have made to get your system to the point where it is useable for your particular situation. If your hard drive crashes, all that work is lost and you start over from ground zero.

That is exactly what I was contemplating when I started looking for a program that would easily backup my entire system and also make recovery a snap. I don’t want to have to reinstall Windows and reload and reconfigure all my software, BEFORE I can restore my data. I have used Ghost before, but it wasn’t very accessible and it is also pretty expensive. I saw a post from a fellow blind person, mentioning Casper XP. I did some research, found the program and downloaded a trial version from the publishers web site www.fssdev.com.

I had a 4 year-old 60GB hard drive hanging around from an old computer. I installed it into an external USB drive enclosure, attached it to my computer and fired it up. It was instantly recognized by Windows XP. I then proceeded to begin the testing of Casper XP. My goal was to determine if the program could be installed, configured and used with no sighted assistance.

The installation was smooth. I did note that during the installation, “%p” was announced by Jaws, instead of the name of the program being installed. After installation, I open the program and was greeted by a screen prompting you to purchase the full version. You can tab several times and press Enter on the OK button during the trial period. You are now presented with the main program window. I would strongly recommend that you press the F1 key to enter the Help system. Here, you can familiarize yourself with the features and functions of the program. (Remember, the misuse of such a powerful program has the potential to wipe-out the data on your hard drive, so be careful.)
When you exit the Help system, you are placed back on the main program screen. From here, you can tab through the various functions that the program can perform. In my opinion, the best feature is the ability to clone your entire hard drive onto another hard drive. This is known as the Copy Drive function. When you press Enter on the Copy Drive function, the program walks you through the process of setting up the drive copy. Once the drive copy is configured, you can select to either run it immediately, schedule it to run at a later time or create a shortcut on your desktop that will launch the copy whenever you like. The latter is the method that I chose and it works great. The first time the copy ran, it took about 30 minutes to backup my entire hard drive onto the external drive. When it completed, I checked the contents of the external drive and it did indeed contain a copy of my entire hard drive. When you decide to refresh your backup image, the process takes only about 1 minute. Very nice.
So, how does this process save time and trouble. If my primary hard drive fails, I just replace it with the hard drive that contains the cloned image. I restart my computer and I’m right back where I was after my last Casper backup. You can literally be back and running in 15 minutes, with no sighted help required.

Now for the negatives, of which there are only a few that I came across.
1. You cannot exit the program using the Alt-F4 key combo. I haven’t seen a program where this key command hasn’t worked in many years. You are forced to tab to the Exit button on the main screen.
2. Pressing the Alt key doesn’t bring up the menu on the main screen. I’m not even sure that there is a menu bar on the main screen. You can access the menu bar and the options menu by first going into the Explorer screen and pressing the Alt key.
3. Some of the information on the various screens is read by the screen reader as HTML links. I have to assume that these are graphics that are not labeled properly.

In all, this is a great little program at a very reasonable price. With only a few annoyances, it is very useable by a Jaws user with no scripts required. It is the perfect addition for anyone who is looking to protect their computer information resources. Also note that it does not support Windows 9X, ME, NT or any server edition. It only works with Windows 2000 and XP workstation editions.

One other note. I emailed a question to the companies technical support at 2PM on a Sunday afternoon. I had an answer back in about 20 minutes. In my opinion, that is impressive customer support.

Additional comments, 6/1/2006:
It was brought to my attention by the software publisher, that using the Ctrl-M key combination on the main console screen will display the menu bar. Once the menu bar is displayed, you can press the Alt key to activate the menu. It should also be noted, that once the menu was activated using the above keyboard command, the Alt-F4 command exited the program, just as you would expect.

It should also be noted by users of Windows 9X and ME wishing that this type of program was available to them, that the company sells a product called Drive-to-Drive. It is claimed to perform functions similar to Casper XP, but for the older platforms. I have not evaluated this product, so I cannot comment on how well it works or its level of accessibility.
If you have a need for such a product, I would download the trial and give it a go.




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