Norton Ghost: Cloning to a new laptop?

Hey, I'm new to the forum.

I just have a few questions about Norton Ghost.
Can I save a complete clone image of my current laptop to my external hard drive then restore it to my new laptop from my external hard drive and it will be exactly identical to my current laptop (minus the hardware upgrades and such)?
Will it be a full disk image backup contains everything, like my registry (because I have a done a few registry tweaks and I don't want to have to redo them)? Like a snapshot of my hard drive?
When restoring, does it erase everything that is currently on the hard drive and replace it with what was backed up?
I am very new to disk cloning and don't know much about it.

Thank you for reading