Complete system backup questions

Thanks - I've looked at both products online and reviews of them don't inspire me to invest in either one. I'm also a bit surprised to find that this isn't better addressed in online forums etc.
My current backup routine (the backup utility that comes with Vista Home Premium) I think just backs up documents and data files. That's fine, but if the whole thing crashes (or my computer gets stolen) I'd REALLY rather not have to find all the original disks & programs and reinstall them, then figure out what all my personal settings were; and what would I do about reinstalling programs that were originally downloaded, so I don't have disks? I guess I should have made one...which brings me to my wish to back up EVERYTHING in one place.

So what would happen if I backed up everything on my existing laptop to my external drive, then something happened to my laptop, then I bought a new one and tried to copy everything from the external drive to the laptop? Would that work, and if not, why? is it just that it would take a very long time to copy everything? Could I set the whole affair up to start at the close of the day and return to it (finished, ideally) in the morning?

on my two IBM/Levono ThinkPads. Buy a 2.5" hard drive of ample size to hold the contents of your drive. Find an external USB-2 case to hold the drive. Clone your existing hard drive. In case of a catastrophic failure of the drive, you just swap it with the cloned drive.

If you "loose the laptop", you still have all your personal "stuff" on the clone.

You get the cloning software with most name brand drives. I prefer Seagate.

...and perhaps I should have bought a 2.5" external hard drive in the first place. Can I make my existing hardware (Seagate "Free Agent" Desktop, 500 GB; the laptop is 220G, I think) do the job? I couldn't swap out the drives, but I could copy the external drive contents to a new machine. But see next comment, and my reply....

when running the XP you want to copy. And you can't copy boot sectors at all.

Kees

I suppose if my laptop was stolen and I had to replace it the new machine would likely have the OS preinstalled anyway, so I wouldn't need that. Even if my computer was not stolen but crashed such that a complete system restore was called for, I DO think I have the original disks, therefore I could use those. But boot sectors? what's that, and what could I do about that? BUT see reply to next comment...

on backup, cloning, etc.,.

VAPCMD

I'll see what I can learn over at storage. Thanks to all