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Selective cloning of new hard drive

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Can I clone an xp laptop hard drive and only bring selected few programs forward (i.e.; Excel, Word, etc). Over the years I have loaded this poor xp machine with tons of programs that I don't use.

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Nope. Why not uninstall the programs you don't want? Installed programs are laced into the files that make up the windows registry--removing the program and the registry entries is not easily done except by uninstalling, which does specifically that.

No you cannot only clone programs "back",. The Windows platform tightly integrates the applications with certain OS components (folders and files, etc.) so it is not possible to separate them out. The only approach is to image the system partition including the programs installation folder and to restore it as a whole.
You can backup your existing system disk, then uninstall the unwanted programs...