Putting new computers together from scratch is relatively easy. A much bigger trick is totally moving an existing software system including the OS and every piece of software on the computer to a totally new hardware base. Symantec offers a commercial product (Ghost) which is supposed to do that but which is problematical for several reasons. The Free Software Foundation offers a stunningly good piece of software along such lines: http://www.clonezilla.org I've used Clonezilla for work projects which have mainly involved cloning linux systems, and last week put it to a kind of an ultimate test which it passed easily....