Windows 7: HP bad motherboard, best backup restore strategy

HP Pavillion 6823w
I bought a hp desktop. Got everything set up. Programs etc.. Started having problems. Motherboard bad. HP warrantying but I am going to lose all my setup and programs. What is the best backup and restore strategy for this situation. I have macrium installed and keep backups but I have never had to restore before. I want to backup up and hopefully restore all except the operating system which hp is reinstalling after the repair. Advice appreciated.

I assume all of your personal data and installed programs are on the same partition as Windows?

As you imply, if you restore your own Macrium image, it would overwrite the fresh Windows installation done by HP--and I assume you do not want to do that.

In such a case, I think you would be forced to reinstall all of your own programs individually after HP returns the machine. You can't selectively retrieve installed programs from an image without an outright restoration of the image--which you don't want to do.

You could restore your personal data files from the Macrium image, but I wouldn't rely on that. Instead, I would do a file by file backup of personal data to an external drive of some type before HP touched the computer. You could use an application dedicated to that type of job or just do a drag and drop with the mouse.

Thats what I was afraid of. Oh well another 2-4hrs down the drain. Thanks hp... Thanks for your help..