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1. For keeping two drives synchronized, check out GoodSync. It's powerful, and I use it to keep two separate computers holding identical copies of two major folders of data synchronized, so if one goes down, there's minimal loss of data (1 hour, max) I use this, for example, to keep a client's two 1TB collections of photos and iTunes synchronized. http://www.goodsync.com/

2. For making backups that are compact, efficient and easy to recover, look at "Disk Snapshot". It's inexpensive, robust and I've never experienced a restore failure. I make "Disk Snapshot" images of every computer, every night, in a development environment. That way, if the thing I just did breaks the system, I can restore a 100 GB Drive is less than an hour by booting from a CD and pointing to the backup on an external drive. http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm

Some minor notes here...

1. Windows 7 on a new laptop.

IMO a new laptop is not essential; BUT it must be 'Windows Logo' for Vista or later otherwise Windows 7 will use a rubbish unaccelerated frame buffer video driver.
Also I would make sure you use the 64bit version of Windows; it's a slightly more hostile environment for malware.

3. Create a regular user account ...

This is good idea; but treat it as a 'best practice', give him both passwords. After all we have here a 12 year old with some skill at Linux. He has physical access to the machine so he already has higher access than Windows Administrator. If all else fails he can take a screwdriver and move the hard disk to another machine.

5 Backup the machine ...

Lots of tools for this: One I like is http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm it has a linux restore option so you only have to do a PXE Linux boot and restore the image from the network. In addition it does Differential Disk Image backups; something that most Image backup makers claim is impossible. All this using VSS from the running Windows installation and you can initially store the backup files on the same disk you're backing up. (But don't forget to clone the boot partition too).

But if I'm only doing a one off backup (day Zero) I'll use the Linux tool "ntfsclone" (from ntfsprogs). For Windows 7 you need to copy both partitions and dd(1) the first megabyte of the hard disk to a file.

BACKUPS. I really cannot say this often enough, You will have to restore the machine at some point and you will have to roll back the windows install to day zero. This is not like Linux where you can reasonably upgrade the filesystem through 15 years of changes and still have a fast and clean system. There is no package manager. Windows programs depend on install and uninstall scripts and they are very rarely complete or consistent. They break things, they leave debris behind, and game installers tend to be the worst of the bunch. They not only have "mistakes" in them they have intentional "anti piracy measures" and "DRM" which can never leave the system because that would let you reinstall the game for another 20 day teaser session.

Even that "drive snapshot" program leaves a single registry key behind, insignificant on it's own, but some applications leave hundreds and this machine will have lots of installs and reinstalls. Remember the Microsoft 3 R's ... Retry, Reboot, Reinstall.

Drive Snapshot http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/ It's not freeware, but it works great and it has a differential snapshot function. You should be able to create a snapshot of your master install. Install the next software package. Make a differential snapshot. Shake and repeat. When you're done, you'll be able to mount the different snapshots using Drive Snapshot's Viewer and make comparisons between the installs, etc. Have fun!

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/

Works great, you can restore snapshots from inside Bart PE. Simple to use.

I don't have any free tools to recommend. With that in mind...

1. Many of VMWare's commercial tools have built in capabilities for storing multiple revisions of a computer configuration in as little space as possible - each different install can be a change set keyed off a previous install. Of course, you have to stick to virtual machines for this to work.

2. For my day to day personal Windows hardware I use DriveSnapshot ( http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/home.htm ). It can perform image backups of the running system (even the boot disk). In addition, it gives you the ability to perform Differential backups which store only the changes from the root backup. It also is able to reduce IO on the differential backup by a) only reading allocated space on the source drive and b) storing a hash file for each root backup so that you don't need to perform as much IO on the backup target volume.

You can download a 30-day-ish trial for free. After 30 days, you can still restore from those backups, but if you want to continue to back up, you need to buy it.

It has some super sneaky hackerish administrator-friendly capabilities. e.g. the same executable runs in both windows as a GUI and DOS (even a DOS floppy) as a command line, you can create network boot disks for network restores from a samba share, etc.

And lastly, the author (Tom) is good at responding to email.

-brendan

We have a smaller site with its' own onsite server, probably similar to your business.

We use Drive Snapshot - http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/ - and just run a scheduled task to back the entire hard drive up (replacing that PC's old image) weekly.

This may or may not be of use to you, depending on wether your laptops are in the office regularly or not.

It is not very expensive (not my product) and its great.

While it will not burn your saved snapshots for you, it can password protect them, break them into size chunks of your choosing, mount snapshots as virtual disk drives to recover a single file or directory, etc. You can then burn those to a disk. I am usure of its support on linux, however I do know that you can back up a windows NT based machine within windows, including the boot/system state.