copying & replacing hd

[ddouglass]

Originally Posted by billyo

thanks for your help..i think i'll go with george suggestion,ill do a clone instead of creating an image..but i do appreciate everbodys help and suggestions..

Since you are talking about a laptop with one internal drive you can't use George's cloning method because there is no way to hook the new drive up as an external. His method is great for a desktop with capability to hook up multiple internal drives but not for a laptop.
What Upnext said is the only way you can do this on a laptop. Norton and Acronis can both create images which is a compressed save of the drive and does not require resetting any registrations. I have used drive image files to load thousands of like computers for the Air Force to set them up identical for classroom use. Believe me it works great.
Norton and Acronis will both create bootable CD for installing the program to load the image file and you don't have to load Windows first.