Posted 24 April 2009 - 11:38 PM
Hi Mike.
If you have iTunes installed in the default locations on your Laptop, then the Itunes Music Library will be in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music.
The simplest way I would think would be to connect your external drive to your new laptop. (Make sure it's recognized).
Then on your new laptop, open iTunes and go to "File\Add Folder To Library", and then in the dialogue window that opens, navigate to the backup music folder on your attached external Hard Drive, and select that folder.
Don't go into the folder for individual albums, select the backup folder itself.
I've just carried out the same operation today restoring an iTunes Music backup from my Partition to iTunes on my System Drive, and it worked fine.
There are other ways, such as opening your backup music folder, and simply doing a "select all" and "copy" from your backup folder to your new iTunes Music folder, but I think the first method is better as you are letting iTunes itself do the copying or importing, and it's pretty good at organising it's own library.
Hope that helps, but if you have any problems just post back.