Sure, here is how I did it awhile back.
I got a new computer, I loaded the OS, installed all the necessary drivers and OS updates (i didnt install office, acrobat, games, etc to keep the image a bit smaller). Then, I used Ghost to create an image of the drive and stored it on an extra hard drive. I then burned that image onto a cd. To test it, I formatted the hard drive, took a ghost boot disk, booted to it, ghosted over the image, and everything was the same. The programs are better these days, they can create an image for you and break it up onto multiple bootable CD's if necessary.