Transfer System From One Laptop To A Slightly Different Model?

I recently bought a refurbished HP laptop, a dv7-4183cl. Overall I thought the laptop was great. However it had a problem (it periodically shut down suddenly, as if it had lost power), and I contacted HP. I was quite surprised that this refurbished laptop had a 6-month support contract.

Unfortunately things did not go well with the repair process. I had to send it in three times, and every time they sent it back, something new was broken. Some of these things I figured out and fixed, but others required sending it in again. Plus every time I moved all my files & work back & forth from the 4183cl to an older laptop, it ate up way too much of my time. Eventually I told HP "This is nuts, I'm not sending it in again."

To my astonishment, they just contacted me and offered me a NEW laptop to replace the faulty refurbished one. Wow! Major kudos to HP.

It's a higher-end model (dv7-6199) -- Core i7 instead of i5, 1TB drive instead of 500GB, 8GB RAM instead of 6. So this seems like a fabulous deal.

My question: I've spent way too much time setting up this laptop -- installing software, customizing, etc. I would *really* rather not have to do that again. If they sent me another dv7-4183cl, I would just take an image backup of my laptop and transfer the image to the new one.

Can I do that from the 4183cl to the 6199? I suspect most OS settings will work OK, and Windows 7 will probably figure out and fix any drivers/etc that are different. (For example the 6199 has a Radeon graphics processor vs. ATI in the 4183cl.) The bigger disk is my biggest concern. What happens if I restore a 500GB image to a 1TB drive? Can I extend that partition, or would it be better/possible to create a second 500GB partition?