There will come a time when you need to upgrade to a new PC. You won’t need or want to move across any of your old hardware, but your hard drive will be jammed full of software you’ve installed over the last few years, important work files, personal information, application data, your favourite music and so much more.

One option is to copy across all the important data to another drive. This has one key advantage in that you only really copy across the information and data you require. You can then install all your important applications back on your new PC and then move across your work and other data. Result is a relatively clean system. The major downside is that you have to find all your original installation CDs, serial codes and then forget that your preferences and other application data has to be configured from scratch.

The most appropriate method is to use a tool such as Paragon Drive Copy to copy your old drive to the destination drive. This will copy across everything, including OS, hidden files, work, data and more. Better still, the destination drive can be configure like the original, so your partitions are kept intact.

If you purchase or upgrade to the Professional edition of Drive Copy, you’ll see a number of additional features such as the facility to create and manage partitions manually, change or set a drive letter and even undelete an accidentally deleted partition from your drive.

The new Drive Copy 9 has a re-written engine and includes a recovery media builder. It also supports Vista 64-bit.

Note that this trial version is function-limited and acts as a preview for the software. You won’t be able to copy drive contents using the demo.