Can it be that easy?

Hi folks,
I want to replace my system hard drive with a new, larger, hard drive.

If I backed up everything that's on my main system drive to an external hard drive using something as simple as say, Windows hard drive image backup, and then replaced my main system hard drive with a new, larger capacity, hard drive; would it be as simple as acclimating the new hard drive to the Windows system, (make sure that the jumper is in the correct location, formatting, etc. etc.), and then returning all the backed up information in the external hard drive to the now new main system drive? Would that work?
Thanks, Rich
wow, that's a long sentence.

Thanks Blade.
So you're saying to install the new drive as a slave drive and then just transfer all the info on the system drive that I plan to replace to the new, and at present, 'Slave drive' using the Seagate Software.

Then I guess I would use the same software to make that new drive the main system drive. After which I would then reformat the 'old' system drive to make it a slave drive.

I guess that cuts out the need to use an external drive and also allows the Seagate software to do its thing with the new drive.
Thanks, I prefer to do it that way especially when the new drive will likely be a 1tb Seagate anyway, (I haven't bought it yet).

Thank you Rich,
I want to change my hard drive out because once you fill the hard drive to 50% capacity or more read/write speeds start to drop off because of the search time. I have a program called Ultra Defrag 3.0 which I have set up to place the most used programs on the outer edge of the disc and the least used just behind that.

Unfortunately 60% of my programs are used on a very, very regular basis so placement of the programs I use the most are competing for the same space. Then depending on which one I last used, will be moved to the outer edge replacing the one that was there from the day before in the defrag process.

I do a 100% defrag every single night and in fact, that's the last thing I do before I shut down the computer. The other reason is that the hard drive is about three and half years old and I'm just starting to get nervous because I have so many programs and information that is very important and expensive stored on it.

I don't know enough about RAID to make that a real viable option right now because I have too many other things going on and just don't have the time to start learning about it. There are all kinds of reasons and possibilities as to why cloning and operating system drive could fail and I know it is precarious to do.

If I want to do it the way you mentioned, install a new drive and then load it with the Windows operating system, where would I get the Windows operating system to load? The computer came with Windows 7 64-bit already loaded in the hard drive and that hard drive is the only original piece left of that computer.

I guess I would have to clone the operating system from the old hard drive, right?
Thanks, Rich, (that's my name too)