Minor Niggles: boot and sleep

[yelloguy]

I have been using a Dell Inspiron 530 desktop with OSX for about 10 months now. Its very functional and I have no major complaints with it. I have a 1TB external HD with a 500GB Time Machine partition.

 

However, I have had to recover twice from my Time Machine backup and both times it screwed up my boot process. I have a Vista partition taking up 200 GB on my hard drive just in case of an emergency. I have Darwin as my primary boot loader. The hard disk is formatted as MBR. I would like to know if there is a better setup that will give me a better backup and also backup my boot sector so I don't have to go through the pain of writing Darwin, Recovering Vista, switching active partitions everytime there is a problem. I have a registered copy of SuperDuper which I do not use because I trust a TM backup more. I understand that SuperDuper can do bootable backups but when I was experimenting, I could not make it bootable with the MBR partition and that is why I gave up on SD. So, is there a better setup? Would Chameleon be better?

 

The other small problem I have is the lack of sleep. Is there anyone who has had better luck with sleep on an Inspiron 530 desktop? Does a vanilla kernel install with EFI emulators and such makes sleep work? Since I have the time machine backup, I guess I can start over afresh and restore everything from TM again.

 

Thanks in advance.