It's largely a matter of preference, in my opinion. What's important is that you are thinking about backup.
Personally, on Windows workstations, I use
Casper more often than I use Acronis True Image or any other drive imaging program, although I think Acronis is an excellent program.
I use Casper out of habit, because I can configure it to run automatically from within Windows, and because the copy is an exact, bootable clone (except for the pagefile and certain other files that are automatically re-created if the new drive is pressed into service). Recovery consists of swapping the cloned drive in place of the failed drive.
I don't consider Casper a complete or "perfect" backup solution, but rather a means of minimizing downtime. Most of my clients are small businesses, and being down one computer can be a big deal for them. With Casper, I can get the machine up and running in ten minutes or less in the event of a primary hard drive failure or if Windows craps out. There are no archives or images to extract. I just swap the drive and boot up.
For a laptop, I may not schedule the copy to happen automatically, especially if the laptop is only used intermittently. I put a shortcut on the desktop that refreshes the external clone when clicked, and then I hope that the user actually does it regularly enough to keep the clone up-to-date. I also put the external drive in the carrying case with the laptop with a card taped to the enclosure explaining that the drive inside is a bootable clone of the system drive, so if the internal drive dies while the client is traveling, any tech can swap the drive and quickly get the laptop up and running again.
If you choose this method, make sure that the external drive you back up to is, first of all, a laptop drive (I know, this should go without saying... but I've come across people who overlooked that detail); and secondly, that it has the same interface as the internal drive (SATA or PATA). Otherwise it won't fit in the laptop when the time comes to use it. It also should be the same capacity or larger than the internal drive.
I also recommend
Files Anywhere or a similar network backup solution for truly critical files, in addition to whatever local backup method you choose.
Rich