With a new laptop to backup to Time Machine the initial backup can be very long. In fact it takes many many hours to get the 100+ GB of my disk backed up. So I tried a different approach that is working quite well so far. Going to the Time Machine preferences on the laptop I setup the Time Capsule as the backup disk and then set Time Machine to exclude most of the top-level folders on the disk. This allows a relatively quick backup to the Time Capsule to succeed. Once that is done then each day when I connect the laptop I can go back to the preferences and remove a folder from the "excluded" list. In this manner I can add a little bit to the backup each day and in the hours the laptop is on at home it slowly all gets added to the backup.