iTunes does not find playlists

I have a new laptop (running Vista) but had all of my iTunes music, videos & games (I thought all of the files but the actual iTunes) on an external drive with my old laptop. I got iTunes to pull in the library of music, videos & games, but not the playlists. Two questions:

- are playlists somewhere "hidden" in the iTunes music folders?
- if I hooked up my iPod (I haven't yet because I want to make sure everything is there) can I pull over the playlists and have them back in my iTunes directory so I can manipulate them? I would hate to recreate all of them.

Thank you in advance.