Recently used EASEUS Disk Copy to clone the hard disc in my son's laptop
http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

Put new hard disc into a USB disc housing.

The Disc copy program is a CD image. Burn to a CD and boot the laptop using the CD. Connect the USB hard disc and you should be able to clone the laptop hard disc to the usb hard disc. After that fit new disc into laptop and all should be wonderful. If you new hard disc is bigger than the original (which is what I was doing) you now use the inbuilt windows hard disc manager to adjust things.

Hope this helps.

John