You may want to consider Clonezilla, which is a free and open-source replacement for the popular Symantec Ghost (formerly Norton Ghost) software.
If you can have someone take your hard drive out of your laptop and connect it to another computer, you can just create an image of the whole drive and copy it to the new drive before installing it. A good (free for personal use) utility for this would be DriveImage XML (which functions similar to the older Partition Magic for you Norton loving folks, but since it's been long discontinued, I think DriveImage is the clear winner here).