Best Way to Swap Hard Drives?

I have a 40 GB IBM ATA / IDE that I will be replacing with a new Western Digital SATA 160 GB Caviar SE
Besides copying all my files and documents and burning them on CDs / DVDs, is there an easy way to hook up the two drives and transfer all the information? I think Windows XP will accomodate that, but with dissimilar drives?
Thank you.

Windows XP Home SP2
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
Asus A7N8X Deluxe v2
Asus V 9950 Ultra
1024 Mb OCZ PC 3200
Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480 W

 

Why not just use both drives???

 

I wanted to use the old (small) drive in a different computer for my wife.

 

done this many times

if you have a pc that you can hook those 2 drives up as slaves to then you can then copy the files over that way

bewere on some drives it will mess up the boot sector on the master drive your hooking up as a slave [some say that that can happen i have done this more times then i can count [and i can count pretty high lol]
and it never happened to me

50cal

 

Here is my 2 cents:

IMHO, start FRESH, backup and transfer the important/needed files and application settings but I would not copy over each and everything. In most cases it is better to install everything from scratch since besides good things(program settings, personal files, etc.) you could be copying over bad things(invalid registry entries, damaged program and OS files/settings, viruses, etc.) as well!
....but at the end choose what suits you the best!