Restoring to laptop

Ok, so I'm about to approach my first restore with MR5 Standard Edition, on a laptop with Windows 7 Home Premium. I'll be restoring the C: drive - Windows and my applications.

I have image backups on an external USB hard drive and I have a Windows PE rescue CD. The laptop does not have a CD drive so I will use an external CD drive connected via USB for the rescue CD.

I assume this combination should work, am I correct?

Should I boot right from the rescue CD and proceed from there or should I start in MR5 from Windows on the laptop?

Should I wait until the laptop has booted up from the rescue CD before connecting the external hard drive with the images on it?

Thanks!