Shadows Protect! In my opinion, it's better than Ghost and Acronis. It also has a "Independent Hardware restore" option that will allow you to restore the image on a computer with different hardware. Pretty slick!

Sorry for not getting to this sooner, but I wanted to test it before I said anything.  You need to prevent the BSOD that comes with moving the HD or image over.  Once done, you can just load up the new drivers.

1.  Boot up your original laptop.

2.  Go to your Hardware Settings and look up your IDE settings.  You'll have something like Primary IDE Channel, Secondary IDE Channel and VIA Bus Master IDE Controller.  Change all 3 drivers to Standard IDE Controller.  (You'll need to choose the driver from the list.  Don't let the OS auto detect it.)

3.  Move the HD or take an image of it and move it to the new laptop.

4.  Boot up and install the new drivers.

My Gawd floks!  Get an external USB drive cradle, pop out the old hard drive, drop the drive into the cradle, plug the drive cradle into the new laptop's USB and transfer anything or everything you want directly from the drive.

After that if you still feel the need to image the old drive, you can do that while it's cradled to the new laptop too.

And if you're really lazy, you can boot from the cradled drive as well, otherwise it's just external mass storage.

No muss, no fuss, no software, no having to figure things out, just plug and friggin play!

K.I.S.S.

Well my philosophy on new drives has always been: backup and move over stuff you can think of. The rest you didn't need anyway if it didn't pop into your head to back up

Definitely fits the lazy thing...

Simple perhaps, but it won't work.  Not unless the new laptop is identical to the old one.  You won't be able to boot from the old drive.  You also can't simply transfer programs and expect them to work.  Same with the configuration that Frogboy wants to migrate. The only thing you could transfer that way is the basic data.

Unless your OS is Windows 98 or earlier.  In that case, I'd use a hammer.   

Worked for me when I migrated from XP to Vista.

But then, that's just me.

And course you can't transfer applications and expect them to work, that's all install and OS registry.

Well yea but that's the point of cloning. Being able to clone a hard drive to another precisely so I don't have to reinstall all my programs.

Even so, it generally won't work if the hardware is too different.

Not reliably, anyway.

Cloning is more for building multiple computers with identical hardware specs, or as a backup for the current system.

You can try this software: http://www.novadevelopment.com/products/us/tzw/default.aspx.

I've never tried it, but it seems to be an interesting one.

I've found that the easiest way to move your stuff to a new machine is copy/paste.  That is of course if you've been keeping your personal files in a single, well organized location.  But you've been doing that, right? 

Settings from various programs is a different story.  I've tried a few software packages that claim to do this for you seamlessly, but none were compatible with all of the programs that I use.  But then again, since I'm re-installing those on the new machine from scratch, fiddling with their settings doesn't takes much longer.  Most have their own Export/Import Settings option anyways.

It usually doesn't take me more than 2 days to move to a brand new machine.  That includes a complete wipe of the Hard Drive to clear out the pre-installed crap, installation of Windows (and Ubuntu on a dual-boot) and all the software I use.

I just did it again on a server.  We were getting intermittent failures where the system would freeze.  I needed to move all running programs, data, configurations including weblinks and an FTP site over to much newer hardware that was incompatible with the old system. 

The old hardware was a vintage P3 running 512MB of ECC 133 SDRAM.  The new stuff is a Core2 Duo with 2GB of garden variety DDR2.

I just went to the running server and changed the Dual IDE Controller, the Primary IDE and Secondary IDE drivers to Standard IDE drivers.  Imaged the drives with Acronis Server and restored the images to larger drives.  Installed the new drivers from the motherboard's CD and it works like a charm.