Question About Clone Backups (restoring from SuperDuper!)

Hey all,

I got a new hard drive and RAM for my MacBook this past week and decided that, once I had my hard drive installed, to use my bootable backup and clone it to the new hard drive. Well, first off, things didn't work right from the start. I was under the impression I could boot off the clone (FireWire), run SuperDuper, and copy the backup over to the hard drive. Didn't work. So, I then went into Disk Utility and did a restore using a sparseimage that I had made with SuperDuper. Once everything restored I went ahead and made the new hard drive the startup disk and restarted. Unfortunately, that's when I noticed things being not right. My MacBook was running really slow, taking 5-7 seconds to open a Finder window. I also had several extra folders in my OS X directory. They were shortcuts to Ver, Temp, and some other one. So, I decided that, being used to the Windows way, I would just have to erase and install OS X due to the new hardware.

What I'm wondering is...did I miss something or do something wrong? I have always been under the impression if you have a bootable backup you could save the hassle of a reinstall. That's the whole point, right? Does it change when you mess with the hardware? And I'm also wondering what is better to use with SuperDuper and a FireWire drive? An image of the hard drive as backup or a bootable backup? So many questions...need so many answers!

Thanks.