>I recently purchased Norton Ghost. I need to install it on my notebook so that I can copy the content of the drive to an external drive. Then I will copy everything to a new computer. I think that Ghost will require me to activate it via Internet. Will I be able to use the same copy of Ghost on the new notebook? I don't know if Norton will check that one copy has been installed on the old computer and will deny the installation on the new notebook.
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>If someone knows how Ghost works, in terms of activation and license, please let me know.

First, you don't need Ghost at all, there are several freely downloadable tools that do the job e.g. PartImage as part of the GPartEd, Knoppix, SystemRescueCD or other live CD distributions.

Second, you have to decide your overall strategy:

1. Overwrite the software that comes on your new machine, with that from the old
2. Keep the software that's installed on the new machine, but have a copy of the entire hard drive from the old one as a partition on an external drive, so you can copy files across as needed

I think Tracy was referring to option 1. The advantage of that option is that, once you get everything working, it's pretty much identical to what you had on your old machine, so you don't have to reinstall your programs and data. One downside is that unnecessary junk, registry bloat etc. is also transferred over to the new machine. As others have pointed out, if there are major hardware differences then updating drivers may be a pain, that is if the machine will boot at all. Not to mention antipiracy features of Windows, Office, etc.

I generally prefer option 2. If you're buying a machine from a major OEM like Dell, all the software and drivers you need or have purchased will be properly pre-installed. Yes, you need to reinstall programs and data, but after you do, they are as small and fast as possible. If you can network the two machines together or set up a transfer folder on a USB HD, file transfer wizards these days work OK - not perfect, but they can get you most of the way there.