How do I back up Vista?

My sons laptop took a dump last night. How do I back up VistaHe turned it on to do his homework, it got past the splash screen then ... nothing. No Vista. just a black screen.
Repair installation did not work.
Restore point did not work.
Safe mode..it hangs up at CRCDRIVER.SYS Will not go past it.
Only option I have is to try and re-install everything from scratch. EEEch!
The repair software had a restore from backup option. Since it was never backed up, I could not restore that way.
I just bought a 500Gig external drive and downloaded Acronis. (If thats what I need.)
So somewhere along the way, I make an image of the hard drive. And a few days later, Vista dies again. If Acronis is the right software, how would I go about restoring the image to the laptop? would I have to install Vista then Acronis, then tell it to transfer the image back? I'm kind of lost here. Or would I have a copy of Acronis on a seperate partition on the external drive and work it from there? Transfer the saved image to the black drive?
I'm familiar with Acronis unless someone has a better/easier way to do this. I just downloaded about 18 drivers from Sagers website. There has got to be an easier way.!
FYI Laptop is a Sager NP2096, Vista Premium 64 bit, 320G HD, 4G Ram, P8600 CPU, 9600M GT GPU.

 

If you are saying you have created an image with acronis you can use that image but you have to have also made the bootable rescue media with acronis to do so. You insert the media and boot to the cd and point it to the backup and it reinstalls the system as it was at the time of your backup.

Another way is to reinstall the system and intall acronis on it and recover data of you image you did with acronis.

On the other hand you can use something like UBCD4WIN and plug in you backup device and boot to the cd with UBCD4WIN on it and copy your data over to your backup device and replace the os and your data.

Many options here as long as the drive is still good.

 

Burn a boot CD of Acronis. (Assuming the free version can do that.)

 

I doubt a free version would do it. Back up your data with UBCD4Win and format the drive and reinstall your os and data.

 

the one from Seagate does....