Is this question not closely related to that concerning Back-up to External Hard Drive? To a Bear of Little Brain, it is not clear why a similar operation might not permit the transfer of the entire contents of one computer's hard drive to that of another. Explanations in simple terms, if possible, please............ Martin.

Martin: you are entirely correct. Making a properly configured system image backup of the entire hard disc will back up everything. The "gold standard" these days is said to be the Acronis product, but I use Microsoft's own backup that is included with Win 7. Free and it works, but arguably a trifle slow. It works in the sense that I have had to restore PCs twice using it and both times the whole system was restored faultlessly. As for restoring to another PC other than back to the originating machine, in theory yes it can work (depends on the similarity of the target machine to the originating one), but one might hit both technical problems and software licensing problems. Ian