Migrate hard drive with Windows 7 to new laptop?

I have a Dell D630 laptop that has Windows 7 Professional on it that was in dire need for replacement so I recently picked up an HP G62 laptop that comes with Windows 7 Home Premium.

I don't need both laptops and I'd rather spare myself the time reinstalling all my programs and making sure I didn't forget to migrate any of my data over by simply swapping hard drives from the Dell to the HP. Well, I tried just that and my HP laptop instantly BSOD'd on startup. I'm currently running 'Startup Repair' but it's been sitting there for over 20 mins saying "Attempting repairs..." and nothing is really happening so I don't have much faith in this.

The good news is that before I swapped the drives I made an Acronis image of the Dell drive and stored it on my NAS so I can pretty much try anything with this drive and still get back to where I was if need be.

I find it hard to believe that what I want to do would be rather difficult, although it sure is looking that way. I'd appreciate any advice in making this happen.

Thanks

Edit

All the answers were great, so thank you. I accepted djechelon's answer because the Win7 migration tool saved me quite a bit of time.

Answer

If you have a spare hard drive or partition, you can use Migration Wizard. On Windows 7, I found that it really makes an image copy of your system.

Copy all the data it suggests to the spare disk, then format Win7 on the new laptop from scratch, then restore backup.

It's not as fast as swapping disks, but it will save you the time to reinstall all the programs!