There is no real difference between cloning and imaging, except cloning is immediate as in putting the contents of one hard drive on another for immediate use. Imaging contains the same material (including boot partition and registry) but its compressed for later use. With Acronis, as long as you create the recovery boot CD when you install it, you can put the image onto a formatted blank drive using the boot cd and with the ability to access the image (on drive D or DVD's etc.). The image you made contains all the info about your quicken, including the original hardware, so when you get the laptop back if you put the image back on and there have been no major hardware changes it will work then same as before. Did you test the image on another PC?