Question: I’m upgrading my Windows 7 laptop to a new hard drive.

How can I clone or image the old hard drive over to the new hard drive, so that it looks like nothing has changed (other than the new hard drive) to my operating system and applications?

Can I use what is built into Windows 7 Backup or should I use something else?

Answer: I have used CloneZilla with great success many many times. Not newbie friendly but very powerful and very useful, either copies from one drive to another, or image one disk then restore to another.