Cloing OS and programs only

[stevenrw]

You guys are gonna get fed up with me soon I'm sure...
Todays question:
I recently put in new HDD and decided on the WD Green, believing the advertising blurb that there would be no noticable hit on speed.
Wrong.
There is a noticable dropoff especially when copying and/or saving stuff.
So I thought ho hum, bite the bullet and get a 7200 disc (Samsung F3 seem to be flavour of the month at present) and clone across.
Problem is, that due to the floods in Thailand (plus a bit of creative profit margin enhancement methinks) the price of a 1tb HDD has gone up from about £60 to over £90!!.
So lets look at alternatives. I still have the old 500gB 7200 drive which is fine for my OS (W7 Pro 32 bit) and programs, so that would do nicely for the system drive, but all the cloning software I've looked at will only clone the entire disc (I only have the one partition) and therefore requires a disc at least equal to the one being cloned or greater.
So, your question for today gentlemen, should you chose to accept it, is:
Is there any software available (free or otherwise) that will enable me to clone the Operating system and programs part of a disc to a smaller drive, which would then become my "C" drive? Should that software include a backup/rescue facility that would be a bonus. Maybe something from Acronis?

[Technical Ben]

I think Windows 7 might let you do it manually. Or there is the fully manual way.

Copy the documents/files to a new partition, then you'll be left with a smaller one to clone to the new drive. Just be certain not to delete the existing partition in the process. Or like me, delete the old drive before I copied it to the new one. 

[Glenn]

How about Ghost? I haven't used it in a while, but it used to to what you want, Steve.

[stevenrw]

Mmm, thanks Glenn, but I'm not too sure about Norton products. Maybe Ghost is not too bad, but their Internet security is one to avoid I think. Maybe Technical Ben's suggestion is one to consider, I'll look into the W7 options if its free. I wonder if I'll hit the dissimilar drive size problem though.