Acronis True Image seems slow

[Calum]

Hello all.
I have Acronis True Image 7, I got it free with a magazine or something.  I assure you it's perfectly legitimate anyway.
Anyway, I came to use it and first made a disk to boot from and run the program, as it wouldn't image the disk without doing this.
And it worked fine that first time.
Then I came to make another backup a few weeks later, which failed.
I then ran chkdsk, which found no errors.
I also formatted the external drive I was backing up to (250Gb Freecom external USB2.0 drive, NTFS, about 6 months old).
I tried again the other day, and it was extremely slow.
The estimated time was 21 hours, I went to school and left it running and when I got back, about 8 hours later, it had 8 hours to go.
This seemed extremely slow to me.
Is this normal?
I have a 100Gb drive, with aprox. 55Gb of data to back up.
I use either normal or minimal compression, they each said 1 hour 50 minutes estimated time to back up last time I used it (the 21 hour time).
If this is not normal, can anyone suggest why it would be so slow?
And how I can speed it up?
Any more info needed can be supplied.

Another question, if I may - is it worth upgrading to True Image 10 for £23 or so?
Does it add anything worthwhile?
And would it be faster, could the old version be the problem?

Thanks in advance for replying to either of these questions.
Calum.
P.S. if I don't reply before 6:50pm GMT, I won't reply until sometime Sunday, I'm out all weekend.

[GX1_Man]

I use version 9.x and it takes about 4 minutes to image a drive with a fresh install of XP and Office. I don't know about 10 as I have not used it (no need) but it is really inexpensive at www.newegg.com  When you make an image you should always verify it. If it passes the verify, you will have no problems with it. 

[Calum]

Yes, I did verify the first backup, the second was not completed and the third I cancelled because I needed the PC, and 8 hours would have been a very long time to wait.
4 minutes seems very fast even for saying  have much more data, do you think maybe that the bootable True Image disk is messed up or something?
I think I'll get v10 anyway, it's my birthday soon so I'll have some cash on the way to buy it.
Unless, of course, I discover why v7 is so slow and remedy it.

[GX1_Man]

7 may have had issues with XP. I'm not sure. Version 9 was the best software purchase I had made for quite some time.

[Raptor]

I have Acronis True Image 7, I got it free with a magazine or something.  I assure you it's perfectly legitimate anyway.

Yes, cover in before the anti-file sharing committee gets a hold of you! They're lurking around here..

I got Acronis ... Something on a CD as well with a magazine, I think I should go and give it a shot. 

[patio]

Did you by chance choose a custom file size for the image ? ?

I recall this happening to me once and it made a gazillion image files 100K in size...

This only happened with Ver. 7

[Calum]

7 may have had issues with XP. I'm not sure. Version 9 was the best software purchase I had made for quite some time.

I did update it and so I assumed it was compatible, maybe not.

Did you by chance choose a custom file size for the image ? ?

I recall this happening to me once and it made a gazillion image files 100K in size...

This only happened with Ver. 7

No, I didn't.

Thanks for the replies, as it's my birthday on Thursday I may as well just order v10, seems to be v7 that is the problem.
It's not expensive anyway, and it should do a better job.