Depends on what you want to do. If your preference is to backup the entire drive, OS and all, then Ghost or Acronis are excellent choices to do that. If your laptop hdd fails, you can install a new drive in your laptop and recover the entire thing using Ghost or Acronis.
If all you're doing is backing up your DATA (Documents, spreadsheets, music, etc..) then pretty much any external USB drive sold today comes with a decent backup program to do that. EaseUS is pretty popular and I have that on my kids computers to backup their school data.
You'll need a separate hard drive to backup to. USB drives work well with laptops for that.
What I’m trying to save is everything from an old Toshiba (Vista)
Eventually, I hope to move it to a much newer HP (Windows 8.1)