What's the best way to save/reinstall programs?

[golfladi]

Hi,

I'm preparing my computer for upgrading to win 7 from vista. I have shrunk my c drive & created a new partition. I loaded Norton ghost & did a backup of my program files along with pictures,videos etc. on the new partition. I plan on doing a clean install on my c drive of course wiping out all my programs etc. Now I've started "thinking"...uh oh... can I restore all those program files back on my c drive after the upgrade? Or should I somehow move all those programs over to my new partition before upgrading...in which case how do I do that? Not quite sure what to do....

 

[gregrocker]

Programs must be reinstalled as their installer writes to the registry as well as installing files in several places.

You can try an in-place Upgrade to see how the performance is, until you have time to clean install and reinstall all of your programs. Some have good luck with in-place Upgrades, although they are not considered a very clean install as they can carry over corruption from Vista.

 

[golfladi]

I was wondering about that register thing. Thanks for clarifying that for me. Guess I'll delete that backup.

The other thing I was wondering about are the drivers. I have the cds that came with the computer with the drivers for the graphics card etc. Should I reload these?

I'm definitely going to do a clean install...want to do it right the first time.

Thankyou for your help, much appreciated!

 

[gregrocker]

The installer is mostly driver complete. Newer drivers will arrive in Windows Updates. If any drivers are missing in Device manager, find latest version on the Support Downloads webpage for your computer model, or the device model.

You can also back up the Vista windows/system32/drivers file to browse later for any missing drivers.

 

[golfladi]

Thankyou!