BEWARE when trying to use ATIH 2011 with Win 7 Pro 64

Based on details provided below, here's a summary of my issues and experiences during the past week with ATIH 2011:
1) If you intend to install onto Win7Pro64, then you may need to download the TRIAL version, not the 6868 build, because the 6868 may repeatedly crash the computer.
2) Be sure to establish a restore point before attempting to install this software.
3) The disk clone process will move your D drive to another letter (E?) and establish a “System Reserved” partition (with Win7 OS files) as the new D drive.

Here are the details of my experiences:
I have been using ATIH since '05 (v2008) with XP Pro without serious issues, e.g., no problems cloning disks and making backups through the years. In August 2011 I upgraded my hardware and moved to Win7 Pro. I purchased ATIH 2011 and installed the "latest" available version on an above-average quality desktop system following a clean install of Win 7 Pro 64 (I used v. ATIH_2011_6868_en-US.exe, which I downloaded per the Acronis email instructions). The installation was exceptionally slow, and it subsequently completely bombed and crashed my system. I restored the system and went through the process 3 more times, with each recovery requiring considerable effort to get the system back to where it was before the installation and crash. 2 of the attempts were using Revo Uninstaller, 2 were without. I gave up on that machine and tried to install it on another machine (a brand new Intel i7 Win7 Pro 64, clean install, with superior hardware in all aspects). It also crashed that system...3 times. (once using Revo Uninstall, twice without).

Almost completely exasperated, I decided to give it one more try, this time using the TRIAL version which I downloaded from Acronis, instead of the 6868 file previously purchased and downloaded (I just inserted the purchased SN during the installation process of the v ATIH2011_trial_en_US.exe). Fortunately it seemed to have installed and worked properly, and i was able to clone my C drive onto a SSD. I subsequently switched the boot drive over to the SSD, and everything seems to be in good working order. So, my experience seems to indicate that there is a serious conflict between ATIH_2011_6868_en-US.exe and Win7Pro 64 (given the ATIH file name component "6868", it makes me curious whether it was meant for 32-bit machines and not 64, but I never saw that at the Acronis site), whereas the conflict did not present itself with the first attempt of using the TRIAL version. So my experience leads me to conclude that there must be a problem in the 6868build version that does not exist (or was sorted out) in the TRIAL version. For whatever reason, the Trial seems to work fine, whereas the 6868 never worked (after 7 attempts on 2 clean machines). The 8 installation attempts comprise many hours of frustration with the ATHI software with a win7P64 platform, and I hope that other users of this product on such a platform will not have such frustrating issues or perhaps will be able to avoid them by first installing the TRIAL version.

Second part of this installation experience: Cloning the C drive to another drive (an SSD, which now replaces the previous C drive) also produced a new 1100MB D drive (a partition of the physical C drive, but the process automatically claimed the D drive letter for the OS files) with 30MB of Win7 Pro OS boot flies on it (this new D drive and the re-lettering of the old D to E occurred on both the source and destination disks). Which means that my previous D (data) drive is now E, which means that none of my shortcuts, favorites, recent files, program configurations, and similar links work anymore…all such links/connections/pointers will have to be re-established to refer to the E drive, so I can look forward to wasting yet another hour in what used to be a simple disk cloning procedure.

In summary, I have spent many hours wrestling with ATIH 2011 6868, and it has been a time-consuming and aggravating experience. For whatever reason, the 6868 build version would not work with my 2 Win7P systems, and I can only speculate regarding other systems. The fact that the TRIAL download worked the first time (after 7 unsuccessful attempts to install the 6868 download) indicates that there are some significant differences in those files, and other users intending to install ATHI 2011 need to be aware of these issues.