Full Backup Question

Ok, I’m a newbie to the site – being a electrical engineer I’m normally answering the questions –not asking for answers….

I have (3) separate PC’s at home mine, wife & son. Up until last year I’ve used Norton/Symantec Ghost (2004 Boot disk) to do “Image Backups” of the HD’s of the (3) PC’s….

Ghost has been ‘bullet proof” last year I purchased Acronis 2009 Home Edition & tried to make images of my HD’s with mixed results – maybe me not the s/w.

With the release of Win7 – I snagged a copy of Acronis 2010 Home

Now my questions:

1- I have Win7 32 bit & 64 bit on separate HD’s in my Desktop PC can I register Acronis on either 32 bit or 64 bit & expect it to work on whichever version I finally decide on? At present I’m up in the air as to whether I can use 64 bit, & I didn’t want to register my Acronis copy in 32 or 64 bit & then find out I couldn’t use it in the other version… Several older programs currently don’t seem to work with 64 bit – so I’ll probably use 32 bit Because of this reason, I haven’t registered my copy of Acronis 2010 until I find out if I only have one shot or not.

2- I just made a mirror image of the Win7 HD & the clone appears to work – which is always good …. So I’m probably going to buy 2 more copes…. Have any folks had problems alter on doing this?

3- For a laptop how do I do a mirror image? What I’ve done in the past has been to extract the Laptop HD & take it to my desktop – hook it in & then boot up with the Symantec 2004 Ghost S/W - I’d then make a mirror image…