Storage Automatic backup to harddrive?

Hey all,

I am looking for a backup solution for my mums laptop.
She is looking for something like an external harddrive (pref. small size-wise) that she can just
plug straight in to her laptop and it backs it up automatically. The WHOLE laptop. Obviously the whole
thing the firsttime, then just what is different there after.

Is there such a thing like this that actually works?
Her laptop has about 140GB capacity.

So any ideas what would be a good solution?

 

What OS? If Windows 7/8 the standard inbuilt windows backup isn't all that bad.

Backing up to a small external 500GB HDD will cover everythign on her laptop and more, should only cost about £40:

http://www.ebuyer.com/255186-buffalo-500gb-portable-hard-drive-hd-pc500u2-bk-eu

 

Norton Ghost works great and is pretty cheap too. But Windows 7 backup is actually quite good as Atomic has already pointed out

 

Acronis has this feature, and it's usually not too expensive.

If you have Windows 8 it does it anyway, that's what I'm using; constant backup to my NAS every time I change anything, with old versions etc kept lying around in case I delete stuff accidentally. Works very well!

The Windows 7 backup is just disk images. Very useful for taking a complete image of your C:\ for easy restoring of a system, but less useful for day to day backups as it's too time intensive to do frequently, if you have lots of files.