A clone of the disk with ghost[1] or better yet a hardware solution[2] to the new disk is going to be the "best" way to do this. This assumes the old computer is widows xp + (hopefully with an up to date service pack) and there are no major compatibility issues with the new hardware. This could be a six+ hour procedure depending on how things go so if your time is worth anything to you it's going to be cheaper to come up with a new version of office and if you are trying to put the xp disk into one of those HP laptops or similar with a tone of proprietary (bad) drivers and crapware then you might have issues going from the old system to the new one.

In any case this is really a serverfault.com or supperuser.com question...

[1] http://goo.gl/9MaP

[2] http://goo.gl/lHwD

It boils down to luck a lot of the time. That said, I've had plenty of applications that copy just fine with just folders, as they recreate registry variables on the next load. If you grab the Program Files folder, the C:\Users\$USER\ folder, and create the same $USER on his new computer, I'd be willing to bet you're going to get most of it working with no problem.

Naturally, a complete disk duplication would be preferable, but "heavily damaged" covers a lot of ground. If it's not reliable enough to stay up long enough to make a reliable disk image...

By heavily damaged I mean the screen is almost completely destroyed. Sounds like it works enough to open up explorer and copy files to a disk or maybe run some software I'm familiar with, but the disk itself is not damaged.

Thank you for comment - sounds like a direct copy is at least worth a try. Thank you!

I am really doubtful this is going to work with intuit software or MS office but best of luck...