Cloning VS Migration Assistant VS Time Machine restore

Dec 2006 MBP, disk has never been defragged or re-formatted from day 1, so it's pretty cluttered up.
New HDD coming in today, what do you think is the best way to transfer my system, apps and files to the new drive in a clean way?
(running OS X 10.5.8 now, think I want to do an upgrade to OS X 10.6 while I'm at it...
Should I do that before/after transfer? How does that affect Migration Assistant or Time Machine?)

My preference would be to make a bootable clone on my internal on an external. The clone will allow extraction of users, files, apps, and data at the end of an erase and install. Also, if your Sno install goes bad, then you can clone back to your internal to get back where you started. My preference for installing Sno is an erase and install.
Upgrading ought to be pretty much as good as, as good as, or better than (depends on who you talk to) erasing and installing, and having done so everything still should be in place except for archived incompatible programs after the install. Having a bootable clone is just as important in the case of upgrade as in the case of erase and install.
You bootcamp partition won't be affected under either install method. But, keep in mind that if you want to change its size, then erasing and installing will give you the opportunity to do so. No migrating needed for the Boot Camp partition.
Message was edited by: donv (The Ghost)

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