Info-Mac

Hi,VERY non technical person here, so be kind. I'm looking at a backup drive to compliment my new macbook pro (arriving any day). It will either be the seagate or the western digital 500 gb firewire portable (both equally capable I read, comments?). Here's the question; if I have a bootcamp partition in order to run a windows only program, will the time machine backups capture the new data on the windows partition when performing automatic backups? Even when I'm working in osX? I hope that was clear, thanks!

No, Time Machine only backs up your Mac OS X partition. I believe it also requires the entire external drive to be dedicated to only Time Machine use.

Instead of using Boot Camp, use Sun VirtualBox. It is completely free, and in addition to allowing you to run Windows right inside Mac OS X (among many other features), it will also be backed up automatically by Time Machine. I use it often and I highly recommend it.