I don’t know for sure but I did manage to ghost my hard drive over to a new one. This one is about a hundred gigs smaller than the other but I had it partitioned in half anyway and just backed up all the crap that was on the second partition. It was kind of a pain in the ass as I had to do a repair on my boot image in order to boot up.
I am also trying Readyboost, which is a utility built in to Vista (at least the ultimate version) that basically creates a ram drive on my 2GB USB drive and is supposed to spedd things up a bit. The jury is still out on that one. I can’t tell right now since my system was moving at a crawl before I swapped out hard drives anyway.