I had an email exchange with a reader about making backups of a computer’s hard drive and then restoring those backup files when moving to a new computer.

The reader found out first-hand that having a good backup is a lifesaver and restoring from backups is easy, but only if you are staying on the same computer.

If you back up your hard drive and the drive dies, it’s easy to go buy a new drive, put it in your computer and restore the backup files.

If it’s your computer that dies, you’ll have a harder time getting things back up and running.

The reader said he took the hard drive out of his old laptop. Using a USB cable, he was able to move his documents, music and pictures to the new laptop, but he was asking if there’s any way to move things like his email and applications from one PC to another.

I told him he was doing things the right way.

I also told him to think of the situation as a good time to start fresh with a pristine copy of Windows and new installations of all his applications.

I realize that finding installers and license numbers for all your applications can be a pain, but it will be much better for you in the long run.

The reader did tell me he’d do some research and if he found a method he liked, he’d let me know. I told him I’d do the same.

We actually found the same solution: a suite of programs from a company called Zinstall.

Depending on your situation, Zinstall has a few apps that can help migrate your old programs to a new PC, but they’re not free or cheap.

A copy of Zinstall WinWin, which is what you’ll need to transfer from one PC to another, costs $119.

The transfer can happen wirelessly if both PCs can boot up and get online, or you can use an ethernet cable.

If your old computer won’t start but the hard drive is still good, you can take it out and use a USB hard drive adapter to connect the old drive to the new PC to do the transfer.

You’ll need to have Windows installed on your new PC before using Zinstall.

Macintosh users have an easier time with these tasks. I’ve been using a Mac app called Carbon Copy Cloner for years. It does all the transferring of data, including the Mac operating system, and it works perfectly (in my experience).