I've been trying to back up my laptop since I bought it last year, but the
first time I did it, it said "backup failed" (I didn't look at why, just
gave
up) and since then, every week when it does its sad little attempt to back
up, it says "last backup failed".

I finally decided to give it another crack tonight, but when I looked at
the
D drive, it said that I only had 1.28GB free of just over 5GB. I looked in
the file to see if there was anything I could get rid of so I could start
from scratch, but apparently there's nothing in there apart from the
little
RECOVERY file (87kb) which it says I shouldn't touch, so I'm not going to!

I am completely computer deficient and I have no idea about anything!! I'd
be really grateful if someone could give me a clue (in Vista Backup for
Dummies terms) as to what's happening here and how I can FINALLY back up
my
laptop, and maybe even begin to love it like I should!!

..
This is a common problem. The D: drive is actually a partition (a reserved
space) on the hard drive where all of the original software that came with
your computer is stored. This makes it possible to restore the computer to
"factory fresh" condition if the operating system gets corrupted. The Vista
backup program attempts to backup to a location other then C: and chooses
D:, but there is very little free space in the recovery partition, so the
backup fails. You need to either disable the automatic backup or
reconfigure it to use a different drive. That would mean getting an
external hard disk or a large flash drive.