Some time ago, I was disappointed to find that you even need to reinstall everything when you move to an identical computer in every respect
Not true. You simply need to prepare the OS for the move. Most issues arise from storage driver problems and can be dealt with
like this. Some years ago I built an XP image for a 5000+ workstation environment. There were over 20 different types of machine, of varying brands. The image came up clean on every single one of them.
The replacement for caddies in this day and age is virtualisation and lots of RAM. Get yourself a copy of VMware Server (free) and use Ghost or qemu-img to convert your existing disks to virtual disks. Tada... all done! There's also Microsoft's Virtual Server, but it's truly awful and best avoided IMHO.