replace laptop hard drive???

[wk3000]

Occasionally my Dell Inspiron 8200 w/ XP Pro cannot "see" my hard drive to boot. Dell has sent me a replacement hard drive, but of course I have years of stuff on the existing drive I'd like to save. Backing up data and documents is pretty easy, but I really don't want to lose all my settings for XP and various applications (mainly MS Office, Word, Excel, and Outlook in particular --things like dictionaries, Favorites, templates, etc.) All of these programs were indunced with the laptop that i had purchased. Has anyone written down instructions on how to save and re-install all this stuff onto a new hard drive?