Transferring from old pc to new laptop

buyitall

I have bought a laptop to replace the old family pc. I have an external hard drive with everything backed up from the pc. If I plug the hard drive into the laptop, can I just drag folders onto the new laptop?
CanI also copy whole programs eg itunes, or do the programs themselves have to be installed by downloading/cd?
Any advice on how to manage this process? Should I just copy everything from the harddrive or will this just fill up the new laptop with rubbish, shall I just copy what I really need?
The external hard drive is less than half full - is there any way of partitioning it so that I can start afresh using a different part of it to perform back-ups for the new laptop?
Thank you so much for any advice xx

geewhiz

Yes you can just drag and drop folders / files from drive to laptop.

Programs need to be installed, you can't just copy them over.

I personally wouldn't copy everything over unless you need it, there's no point filling up the laptop when it's already on a drive, vista uses a lot of space anyway so it's good to have some free.

If you partition the drive you will lose everything on it, can't you just have a new folder for laptop backups instead ? If you want to partition it then you could copy everything onto the laptop while you do it then move it back afterwards.

buyitall

Thanks that's really helpful, i'm trying to be really organised with this laptop.