If you clone your Hard drive, you won’t need to reinstall anything as it would be a complete duplicate of your current install, just on a new disk.
I did that last year when I moved from an older 100Gb disk to a new 500GB disk when the older disk was giving me a lot of errors, and cloning the drive, including all the partions and expanding them as I wanted was pretty easy.
While I used Ghost, Arconis is also very good, and is probably easier to use.
Just to wrap this thread up, I thought I should report on how the hard drive swap went. Following directions I found online for my particular laptop, I pulled the old hard drive to check its speed (5400 rpm), and its communication method (serial ATA). I bought a replacement drive with the same specs, but more space for $60 AUD.
With the old drive back in my laptop, I used the trial version of Acronis, as drachillix suggested, to create a backup image of my old drive onto an external USB drive. I then used Acronis to create a bootable CD.
I pulled the old HD back out of the laptop and this time replaced it with the new drive. With the new HD in the laptop, the bootable CD in the CD drive, and my external HD connected via usb, I booted up the computer and used Acronis on the CD to copy over the backup image from the external HD to the new internal HD.
The whole process was smooth, and a fraction of the headache a sudden loss of HD functionality would have been, even with my data backed up (but not imaged) as it was.
How does the saying go? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?
Thank you again for your help!
For my clients I always say swap it out. (new HDD) for my kids home machine I keep a good backup and wait for it to go. It could be quite a while it could be today. FWIW on my media server I would swap it ASAP.