Sending laptop away for warranty. fastest way to restore everything?

[cutcopypaste]

I need to send my laptop away for warranty repair.. when it comes back, it will of course be factory reformatted and put back to Vista Home Pro (though I have a W7 upgrade that came with the same laptop). Can I make a back-up of everything on an external drive and then boot from some sort of CD and copy it over to the formatted hard drive to get everything back the way it was?

I saw that drive image xml can make a full back-up of all my data, but getting it back on is more complicated... don't have any easy way of taking my drive out and hooking it up to something else and I worry that would void the warranty as well...

What's the easiest way to get this done?

 

[buwish]

Have a look at this:

http://www.intowindows.com/using-windows-7-image-backup-tool/

 

[cutcopypaste]

Haha.. nice! included in the OS.. not bad at all. thx.

 

[cutcopypaste]

Best answer selected by cutcopypaste.