Copy, Reboot, and Paste some old Programs...

[Guest]

Hello, i have a sony vaio.. im thinking of rebooting it.. first off, i dotn have the sony cd anymore,, so my first enquiry is if its possible? secondly,, i have 2 or 3 programs which again i dont have the cd yet i want to retain them,.. so is there any way that i could just copy them to my external hard drive, then try to reboot, and paste them old programs? im not very good computer as you may have noticed,, i hope someone could help me.. thank you very much.

 

[C12Friedman]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums,
I believe you are considering re-installing (restoring) your operating system (rebooting is done when computer starts/restarts). If you made the back-up as suggested in the Vaio's set up guide, you will (should) be able to restore your operating system using Sony's recovery program which will do the recovery from your hard drive. Note that the origianl back-up , if not done since then, will not have any programs you've installed since then.
If you did not set up a backup then, you should be able to set one now (which will copy all of your programs and drivers) but, if you are doing this because it is running slow or may have malware running around inside, you will be better served (probably) going through this guide...
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/8263-63-simple-free-guide-removing-malware
Hope it helps