Backup for Home PC and Laptop

["Lennon_s_j@xxxxxxxxxxx" <lennon_s_j@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I want to move beyond CDs for backup of my home PC (XP) & laptop 
(Vista).  The obvious solution seems to be a USB External Hard Drive.

Most of the one’s I’ve looked at seem to come with vendor supplied 
backup software, but don’t seem to have much detail on the software 
capabilities.

I don’t know that I want continuous backup.  I’m more inclined to want 
to say when to do a back up (probably weekly) and want to keep several 
generations of the backup (this week, last week, the week before, etc.) 
Though possibly a continuous backup will allow me to keep “n” copies of 
a file and that might be easier for restores.

I also want to back up *both* my desktop and my laptop to the one 
external drive.

I’d like to hear your about your experience with specific hardware, the 
vendor supplied software, or non-vendor specific software (e.g. Ghost or 
Acronis, and your approach to backup).

Thanks,  Sam

(And I’m curious about how these drives connect.  Do they just plug in 
and act like a USB Memory Stick?  Can you reformat them?  Make multiple 
partitions?  Do they all work the same way?--I’ve read some that Western 
Digital drives install some strange software.)