Bret,
IF you are going to have the exact same hardware (video card, sound card, etc) then you can use ghost or Drive Image to create an image of your current Drive.

Then you can 'drop' the image ontop of the new drive after the IT folks are gone and your computer will be just as it was before.

to do this you will need a boot disk and either enough local storage to store the image of your disk or you can include the drivers for your NIC and attach to your network to retrieve the file.


an IT dept I worked in did that with great success.

The one thing that stood out is that it seems you will be on a 'new' network.. so by using an image you would wipe out any new settings the IT folk gave you and that would make them very unhappy.

I would butter up the person doing the upgrade with a lunch invite or something and see what he can do as far as imaging your current setup and then altering the network settings after the image is placed back on the PC. I doubt that will work, but it is worth a shot.