Help needed with accessing my iTunes library across a network, please.

Hi all,

At the moment, my iTunes library is stored on the hard disk drive of my main PC, and sharing is enabled from within iTunes using the "share my library on my local network" option. We have a laptop and after the laptop was authorised in my iTunes account, I was able to access my iTunes library via iTunes installed on the laptop.

I have recently bought myself a second PC and I'm in the process of sorting things out and eventually I would like the second PC to access the iTunes library as well.

I have a large-ish (I think it's 320GB) USB 2.0 external hard disk drive attached to my main PC.

1. Would it be possible to move the current iTunes library, as it is, on to the external drive or would I need to achieve this some other way, such as reinstalling iTunes, creating a new library and then restoring the existing songs from an iTunes backup?

2. If I'm successful in moving the library to the external drive, and I purchased new songs from the iTunes store, or ripped new CD's into the library, would they be automatically stored on the external drive and be available across the network?

3. Is there anything else that I need to do, for instance with regards to the configuration of iTunes, to avoid any problems?

Many thanks, in advance for any help.

Kind regards,

Steve.