Change hard drive but keep old settings? Is it possible?

Hello,
I am a bit new to Mac, but liking it. Here's a question.
My sister has a 2.0 GHz MacBook with the standard 60 GIG hard drive. She has some applications and files and music and pictures, etc. on the computer. She bought a new 120 GIG internal hard drive and has asked me to install it for her. I looked up how and to do it, including formatting the drive, and it looks pretty simple, including with instructions from Apple.
Here's my question: I have an external USB drive. Is there any way I can copy the stuff that's on her current drive to that external drive, including applications, preferences and the like, and when installing the new drive move that stuff to her new drive so that we don't have to install all the software and apps again. Can this also be applied to the OS? A few weeks ago, I updated her OS (to 10.4.7) and firmware and other OS updates. Can these OS settings also be moved to the new drive from the external USB drive?
Thanks.
iMac Core Duo 17" Mac OS X (10.4.7) 1.83 GHz, 1.5 gig RAM

Yes, use Disk Utility's Restore function to make an exact copy of the internal drive to the external. Then swap the old internal for the new one. Then you can boot from the USB drive, open disk utility again, and clone everything back. If you find that you can't boot from the drive, just boot from the install DVD and open Disk Utility from there.
It sounds like your sister currently has no backups. She REALLY REALLY should get her own external drive and make regular backups to it. Super Duper is a good app for this.

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What I did before replacing it was clone my hard drive using "SuperDuper". I cloned it to the new hard drive and then simply removed my old hard drive and installed the new one with the clone on it. Then I booted it up and began running it. In fact I am using it right now.
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Will this work, without problems, indefinitely?
Is this the prescribed way to upgrade ones laptop hard drive?
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Message was edited by: poil66

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Change hard drive but keep old settings? Is it possible?

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