My wife's 2008-era MacBook had a 250GB hard drive. Evidence suggests the hard drive is now dead. (It was running slow over the past few weeks and now, when the computer boots, it just spins.) There's a (hopefully) complete Time Machine backup in her office, where I rigged up an IOMega MiniMax as her backup disk / USB hub. She'd plug in one cord to make her printer, keyboard, and mouse all start working along with the backups, so I'm reasonably confident the backups are good. Hopefully, this experience will be far less painful than the last time she had a hard drive die, for which there were no backups. That was no fun.

I bought a new hard drive (750GB, 5400 rpm, $100 -- ahhh the march of progress) and my rough plan is to first reinstall the machine with 10.7 (since I've got the image laying around -- I still haven't migrated anything in my life to 10.8). After that, I'll attempt to restore her apps and home directory from the backup.

Anybody done something like this before? Any advice or tips and tricks?