Restart Windows while keeping your installed apps intact.
Restart Windows while keeping your installed apps intact.
It's feasible to transfer them to a fresh setup, though I advise against it. You're likely to face compatibility problems, which could cause frustration. Instead, try reinstalling everything. Reminder: use Ninite for installing popular software simultaneously.
The issue with Ninite is it only installs on the primary hard drive. This limitation applies regardless of whether you're using the same Windows version.
There might be some issues with installing Ninite on a secondary drive. It's unclear how straightforward that process would be. You could attempt to reinstall Windows and see if the programs run correctly from the backup drive, or simply reinstall them if they don't work.
Similar to steam, you can save all your old games and simply direct steam to their locations, though programs require reinstallation.
I use this for my Steam library—it functions perfectly. However, for other programs besides games, it wouldn't be advisable. For Steam, simply move it to another HDD or partition and restart Steam.exe after installation; it works!
Yes, you can recover the PC using an earlier backup image created before any issues occurred.