New hard drive - restore vs. transfer from time machine

The hard drive in my MacBook went bad and the shop was unable to salvage any of the data. They installed a new hard drive and installed OS 10.5 from the disk I had.
I have a backup on my TimeMachine device that is probably 2 weeks old and want to restore from that. I was instructed to boot up my MacBook with the TM connected and then do a restore. However, when I do this, I am prompted with a welcome, I pick my language and then it asks me if I want to TRANSFER from a device. I am not given the opportunity to get to the Utilities menu, from which I could do a restore.
From reading the various posts, it appears that you can get to the Utilities menu if you boot up from the Leopard DVD, but I have an OS installed on my drive already.
My question is, if I do a "Transfer", as it's being presented to me, will that result in the same state as that of a "restore" from the utilities menu? If not, should I put in the DVD and boot up from that, even though I've got it installed on my hard drive already?
Thanks,
Melba

Yes, tell it you want to Transfer from a Time Machine disk. The word "transfer" can be a bit confusing but it is what you want.
What you're seeing is essentially the same thing the "Migration Assistant" does (which is in the Utilities folder). Migration Assistant was originally created to let Mac users just "move in" to a new Mac if they buy a new machine. It connects to the "old" machine, finds all the applications, user accounts, and a few other things, and then copies them over to the new machine so that everything is all set up and ready for you to go.
When they invited Time Machine, they implemented a restore by putting it into the same Migration Assistant. It sees the latest backup on the Time Machine pretty much exactly as if it were looking at the hard drive of another Mac and it's transferring all the info over to your new hard drive.
Both methods would restore your applications, and ultimately even all your user data. But the advantage of doing it now (vs. letting it finish booting the system and doing it later) is that if you tell it you want to do it later, it'll end up prompting you for your name, etc. and building a user account for you. Then when you try to do a restore via Migration Assistant later (to restore you apps & data) it will complain that an account under that name already exists and to pick another name.
If you just let it run the migration now it will create your user account exactly as it was from the last backup.

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