[Bryce Yehl] Six and a half hours. That’s how long it took to get my laptop running with the new hard drive. It sure would be nice if Microsoft provided tools to make the process of migrating to a new drive easier, or at least didn’t go so far out of their way to make it so damned difficult.

I can totally sympathize with Bryce - I’ve been there before. I personally think this is one of two big problem areas for users (the other being a need for a central place for software upgrades that are not from MS).

What I’ve been doing with some success is using Ghost to image the old drive, install a new drive and then restore the image.