Originally Posted by JARblue

If you need legitimate software and are willing to shell out for it, I recommend Acronis. It's not the easiest method but the it's the best way if you want everything to be identical on the new machine. It creates an image of your existing hard driver that you transfer to your new computer. You need to make sure that your new hardware will work with your old operating system (I hope you're not on Windows XP). You will need to have an extra hard drive or external drive that is big enough to hold all of the data from your old computer. You will also need to create a boot disk to use in the new computer to restore the image (you can do this in Acronis). Those are the very basic steps needed.

Depending on what backup solution you are referring to, it likely won't transfer everything (the built-in windows backup is garbage for something like this).