I can't tell you how to do it with ghost but I know for sure that powerquest drive image pro does it.  You need to create the boot diskettes to do it.  In my opinion, the program works much better than ghost as well.  I got an oem copy cheap doing a search either on yahoo or price grabber.

Also, when you copy the hard drive from the laptop to the desktop, windows will have to pick up all the different hardware on bootup and everytime I've done it with win 98, it asks for the win 98 cd and unless you have the cab files on the hard drive, the cd drive won't be available and you will have to choose skip until after the third or fourth reboot when the cd drive finally loads.  Don't even try it if you have windows 2000, it won't work.  You have to install win 2k from scratch as well as all your applications then copy the data files.  I've never tried it with win xp.