system recovery type stuff??

[Atherton213]

i was fixing my gf's computer and it has a system recovery thing on it (compaq)... which i ran and it was really simple... although filled with crap software which i eventually just did a clean XP install... but what im wondering is... is there any kind of software that allows me to do something like that... xp and then the most common software that i usually use... and put it on a small partition of my hard drive?? and then hide it so all i gotta do is run it if i ever need to reformat or anything?