Need to Backup all App's and Files to move to a newer powerbook g4

Question

Apple wants me to send in my p.book mostly due to hot spots on the screen. They said they will have to wipe it clean and may wind up just sending me a new p.book. I don't know if they will just send a refurbished p.book that is the exact same model and version as the obe I have (which is 2.25 years old-purchased Oct. 2003), or if they will send me one of the newer p.books with newer hardware and configuraations such as a different graphics card. (If anyone has any idea on this, please let me know). Anyways, I am a designer and have alot of time-consuming files on my mac. As you may assume, I am quite worried about the idea of wiping my computer clean and relying on a Backup to preserve everything. I don't know much about backup/restore softwre, but I was hoping to do what I have heard referred to as a "Mirror Image" type of backup to my WD 120GB external drive. I want to make this process as easy as possible, and am looking for reccomendations of software that will "clone" my current p.book so that I can simply restore to my new p.book and all my app's will be up and running and executable immediately from the restore without having to re-install all app's. I basically want my new p.book to be exactly the same as my soon to be older one (with all the same settings and configurations that took so long to set up over the years). I have heard of Carbon Copy Cloner and Norton's Ghost. How do Mac users genrally go about this when switching to a new system? I have been using Retrospect Express which comes with Western Digital drives, but one tech at WD told me it is not meant to restore to a different/newer system b/c of things like the graphics card, and other 2.25 year newer hardware that will require different drivers. I am worried that if I restore from the wrong software, many of my devices will not be functional due to different drivers/configurations that were not part of the restore I did. I am pretty sure that this will happen if I use the Disk Utility to create a disk image of my hard drive on my external, and then drag it over to my new p.book b/c this seems like it will erase the new p.book's hard drive including the OS 1st, and then simply darg the disk image onto it (which will include my old OS). Although both OS's I am speaking of will be 10.4 Tiger, the older b.up of Tiger will be configured with drivers for the hardware configurations on th elder p.book, and the newer Tiger on the new p.book (with the appropriate drivers and configurations for the new p.book) will be erases and replaced with innappropriately configured Tiger. Does this make any sense? Or is it actually much simpler than this? As you can see, I have never switched systems b4, and just want to make sure I backup using the right software. Any suggestions?
PS-Since I am missing some of my app. cd's, with Macintosh, are u able to just drag the app. folders and drop them on your new Mac and they are fully executable? In other words, are all Mac compatible programs self contained within their app. folder, and they can be simply dragged and dropped without having to be installed? Or is it that some apps can, and other mac apps have to be installed/restored from b.up software?
Sorry for the long nature of this situation : (
Thanks for any suggestions.
PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.3)  

Answer 1

PS-Since I am missing some of my app. cd's, with
Macintosh, are u able to just drag the app. folders
and drop them on your new Mac and they are fully
executable? In other words, are all Mac compatible
programs self contained within their app. folder, and
they can be simply dragged and dropped without having
to be installed? Or is it that some apps can, and
other mac apps have to be installed/restored from
b.up software?
Answer to this: it doesn't work. I tried it; my hard drive started having issues and I did "backups" in this way by dragging and dropping the applications to DVDs. By the time I bought an external HD a couple of days later, I couldn't use my laptop at all anymore, and after replacing the laptop's HD I tried to use the DVDs with copies of the applications. And they did NOT work. Ultimately I only lost a few things--.Mac's Freefall is the only thing that comes to mind right now--but reinstalling all the applications from original disks or from downloads (and tracking down the purchase receipts!) was very time-consuming. Fortunately the folks at the store just shrugged and put iLife back on the system for me, since I had no idea how to extract it off the disks that came with the computer.
I think dragging and dropping did work with A FEW things, but only with basic stuff like Widgets.
Hopefully if/ when disaster strikes again, the cloned drive I now have will make everything much easier. I'm using SuperDuper and it seems to work well enough.
Oh, and I had all my photos/ music/ pictures/ documents/ calendars/ address books/ keychains/ mail backed up in a variety of ways: simply burnt to disk, or burnt to disk using .Mac's backup, or on iDisk. I got all that stuff back without difficulty. The applications were the hassle and so far as I can tell, the applications are what make cloning essential.