Cloning New HardDisk

New to the forum and have checked the post for disk cloning, but they all seem to refer to WinXp. I'm buying a new Dell 1420 and want to clone it's harddisk as a backup harddisk and store the backup harddisk just incase the 1420's harddisk fails. The question I have is it possible to do this with Vista Home Premium and what software would you recommend?
I'm trying to avoid the problems I had with a Dell 1405 hardisk failure I had. I spent a lot of time and was never able to got all the Dell software installed correctly on the 1405. I'm not concerned with data(that's backed up seperately), just restoring the computers harddisk to original state so that everything works as it did on day 1when I first turn-on my new 1420 if I ever have to replace its harddisk.
Thanks

 

It comes with a restore partition that does that... also in the worst case dell will often warranty send you a new hard drive that has the factory stuff on it.

 

Do you mean, after a clean install and all the drivers and system settings configured in Vista - you want a disk image of that?

 

From experience, I know the restore partition does you no good if the harddisk fails. I was never able to get Media Center to work without turning on the computer or Dell F8 key to work after replacing the harddisk on the 1405 and I'm assuming that Dell is doing the same with the partitions on the 1420. I figured a $100 cloned harddisk on the shelve would be a whole lot better than spending a lot of time trying to get everything working like it should - maybe wrong though.

 

No, a complete copy of the harddisk that will be in the 1420 so that I can just replace the failed drive with the cloned drive and restore my data if it ever fails.