Q: I made a backup of my ipad on my laptop.  How do I transfer that backup to a new computer so I can restore the ipad from that backup?

I've got a bit of a quandry.  My iPad2 was running slowly and crashing.  I thought wiping it clean and then restoring from a backup might fix the issue.  I opted to connect to iTunes and do the backup on my laptop... running Windows XP.  Midway through the process, iTunes insisted that I upgrade to the newest version, but that version is not compatible with XP!

I tried to do the restore from backup to my iPad and it tells me that my iPad will not work now unless I upgrade to the latest version of iTunes!  So I'm stuck in a revolving door with no exit.

I copied the iTunes folder to an external hard drive to move it to a Windows 7 machine, but I do not know if the backup with transfer with the rest of the information.

So, how do I best get all my content back on my iPad?  I tried doing a restore from the latest cloud backup - done the previous night, but it is failing and not loading much of my content.

Would appreciate any advice!  TIA