Seems you have already made up your mind
and think you've made the right choice.
Used to use Ghost - but the problem was that you had to close Windows and run Ghost under DOS - think they have corrected that now - but I'm just no longer a fan of Symantec (bloatware which puts all sorts of crap into hard-to-get-at areas of your hard disk).
Acronis runs from Windows and does a very fine (and quick) job of imaging an entire disk. Would personally recommend doing Full Backups rather than incremental backups (incremental backups don't save you very much time and quickly become rather large).
Also - be aware that if you just need to recover a single file, Acronis allows you to mount the image as a disk drive and you can simply copy the file off to where you need it - very convenient indeed!
Very neat software! Latest version is Acronis True Image Home Version 11.0
