From Windows to Mac

Keith asks:

My Win­dows XP PC kicked the bucket, but its hard drive is fine. I bought an iMac; how do I get my doc­u­ments from my PC’s hard drive to my new Mac?

You could net­work your PC and iMac, but your PC is fried. I rec­om­mend buy­ing a 3.5 inch hard drive enclo­sure that has a USB or FireWire inter­face on it. Take the hard drive out of your PC, install it in the enclo­sure and attach it to your iMac. Voila! There’s your hard drive! You can copy what­ever impor­tant doc­u­ments you have to your Mac.

This process is extremely easy; don’t get intim­i­dated by the task of doing surgery on your old PC. Look on the bright side: you don’t have to put any­thing back together!

Once you’re done, for­mat the hard drive using Disk Util­ity (it hides in Applications>Utilities) and you can use it as extra stor­age on your Mac.

*Note: Make sure your hard drive is com­pat­i­ble with the enclo­sure! Most desk­tops man­u­fac­tured in the last year and a half use SATA inter­face while older ones use the IDE (or PATA) inter­face. Take a quick peek at the cable and com­pare it with the afore­men­tioned arti­cles.
**One last thing: You can do this with a lap­top hard drive as well; just buy a 2.5 inch enclosure.