How can i backup / restore just programs?

Hi guys,

I'm sending in my VAIO for repairs, but last time I did this, they did "re-imaging" on the harddrive. I basically got back a clean install of Vista with a bunch of bloatware.

Last time I did a clean install myself, I spent like a week trying to get all the proprietary drivers to work (and still didn't get 100% completely).

So I figure I can use this to my advantage: if they do a re-imaging, I can just restore my programs to the "new" drive.

But... how would I do that?
I don't want to take an image of the drive because of the proprietary driver problems. How can I only backup my programs?

 

You can't. It really is that simple. You would have to find a way to selectively backup portions of the registry, the windows/system32 directory and other locations including the Program files. It's just not possible to do.

In THEORY it could be done by looking at the uninstaller scripts for each of the applications installed on your machine and builidng a list of the registry entries, system32 components etc. But no one has created an app to do this.

Gary

 

No such program, huh? So how do the Sony recovery disks work then? Is there a different idea behind restoring the programs with that?

 

The recovery discs will just include a copy of the installables for each of the programs which are separately recoverable (probably with some mechanism for identifying if you're trying to install on a Sony). Having the installable files is different to having access to your disk where they're already been installed.

 

Actually Recovery disk has the installation file of the specific sony software that you want to install.