PLS help, iTUnes is over 100G on my lap top!!!

Question

First of all great show introducing iTunes Pluss (256 AAC with no DRM). Finally I will start buying music also instead of ripping them myself!
The lack of good controls for the library has suddely become a very urgent issue for me.
My iTunes is now over 100G on my LAPTOP!!!
The reason for this is that I recently started buying a lot of TV shows. Little did I think that they take at least 50x the space of a song!
I know the different ways of seperating, but I really would like to keep all my songs on my lap top and have movies/tv shows/podcasts/audio books that I have listened to move over to an external disk location when I connect to it.
I think that would be the ultimate feature there.
I would also like to have a similar features for songs where I could set all songs graded bellow a certain limit to move over to the external storage when connected.
My issue is that if I use the very cumbersome methods described already (move location to external disk, establish one more library) I am afraid to screw things up, because I defenitely do not want to have it like that in the future.
Another issue here is that all content should always be searchable, even the stuff on external storage.
This way you could order back stuff for next time your computer gets a connection to the external disk (could also be a Apple TV or Windows home Server).
A big irritation for me is also that downloading settings for Podcasts can not be set seperately. Some programs are really worth keeping all of (Like "Security Now" with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte) and other stuff yo ujust want to have the five latest show (just like it is today).
This is how Apple should be doing things, not all this labour intensive, easy to srew up DB stuff.
May be this post should be a spot for suggestion instead, but can't find it anywhere.
  Windows XP Pro  

Answer 1

One simple and lazy option would be to set the library location to be on the external drive. Just go to Edit > Preferences > Advanced Tab, and set the iTunes folder location to be on the external drive. This would cause all new content to be saved there instead and leave you exiting content as is with no changes so not much likelihood of a problem.
The next easiest option would probably be to copy the Move/TV show files, then go though them one at a time, right click, select the "Get Info" option, and set the new location of the files. Then just delete the files off the laptop. This would free up most of the disk space, and avoid a mass migration of thousands of files.
Keep in mind that how ever you do it any content on the external drive will not be available if the drive is not connected to the laptop.
I am not sure what it is you are meaning by "that all content should always be searchable". Search able by iTunes, by the OS? As long as the drive is connected then you would have normal access to the files. It might be slower than you are used to.