Hard drive replacement - Dell Latitude

Hey everyone.
I've got a Lenovo ThinkPad X60s (Intel 1.66 GHz, 1 GB RAM) from back in 2010. It barely gets any use, mostly just serves as a dedicated music player hooked up to an amp. I bumped up the RAM recently, so it's running pretty snappy on Windows 7 Professional. The issue is the factory 70 GB drive is too small, so I want to swap it out. I already have a 260 GB external drive sitting around that I want to use as the replacement. I've already looked up how to physically swap the drive for this model—it looks easy enough. Sizes and connectors match up perfectly...

Here's the catch: I don't want to just swap the drives. I want to keep my exact OS and all my installed apps without the headache of reinstalling everything from scratch. Someone mentioned I could just clone the current drive to that external one, pull the old drive out, pop the new one in, and be done with it. I'm oversimplifying, obviously...
Does anyone here have actual experience doing this? Which software should I use to make the image so this goes smoothly without a massive pain in the ass?

THANKS

You can totally clone your entire drive—partitions and all—onto a new one using software like Macrium or Acronis.

wearymason4 said:You can clone your drive or partitions to a new one using software like Macrium or Acronis.

Yeah... did some digging and watched a few videos. People use an Acronis image for this all the time. It's straightforward enough, but swapping in a new drive usually brings headaches—BIOS settings acting up or something else. It rarely goes perfectly smoothly. That's why I'm asking if anyone actually has hands-on experience with it.