I'm assuming she doesn't have a cdr drive. Can you use a usb flash drive? I assume it's Win98. USB functionality might be improved by upgrading to Win98SE which was a 20 dollar upgrade available from Microsoft. We did this recently with My SO's computer to get some USB device working.

There also used to be a way to make a network connection between PCs using the parallel ports. Not sure if it works with Vista. (I'm also not sure if new vista desktops still come with parallel ports.)

Finding where all her data will be (like outlook email) will be a pain. The "files and settings transfer wizard" might be available on Win98, not sure. However, I know someone who used this to transfer stuff from a Win98 machine to an XP machine. The XP machine then had various problems until I finally saved everything off to CDR and did a fresh install for him.

Thanks again, DF!

Her damn puter won't read flash drives. [She's a techno-idiot so I get stuck downloading photos off her digital camera and delivering to her. I tried a flash drive but had to use e-mail. Me being a nice sucker too, I end up cleaning up her lousy photos (cropping, removing red-eye, sharpening, etc., when the photos aren't too blurry to recognize or aren't pictures of her thumb, and once I even smoothed wrinkles off her face in a pic she wanted to send to an old ex-boyfriend my uncle doesn't know about--she still wouldn't send the picture because her face "looked too wide" *grooan*.) Ghaaaah, relatives! ]

There also used to be a way to make a network connection between PCs using the parallel ports.

That's what I was hoping for, but now that I think about how old her PC is, I think I'm doomed tomorrow.
;-)

Thanks again. Damn, I hope I don't end up forwarding tons of individual e-mails out of her Outlook, and transferring her documents via floppy disc (I made sure she got her new Dell with a floppy drive.) It looks like I'm in for hell no matter what.

She at least has a USB drive. I have a couple of old windows 95 machines without USB ports and am facing a similar task. A ZIP drive will likely be my solution (plugs into the printer port which was the high speed port of the day), but I am going to explore installing a USB port and booting off of a LINUX Live CD. I am not sure these computers have the ability to boot off of CD.

I am not sure these computers have the ability to boot off of CD.

Maybe you boot from a tiny linux distro on a floppy, or maybe you could get grub to boot from a floppy, and then transfer control to boot from the CD? flabdablet could tell you more...

The easiest thing would probably be to take the old drive and put it in a USB enclosure, and then attach that to the new machine and slurp.

Cheaper but less easy: mount the old hard drive as a slave in the new box.

Or put a PCI network card in the older box, make the whole box share-able, and go that way.

Thanks, ROU. I'll check out the details of those options.

migwiz98!

The old e-mails in Outlook should be easy enough to export.

Go to the import/export command under the File menu, and then export the contents of Outlook as a .pst file. When the screen comes up to ask you want folders you want to export, make sure you check the "Include all subfolders" box.

You should then be able to open the .pst in Outlook on her new PC. Voila, all old e-mails are there.

Thanks, all. I'm checking now, hoping that migqiz works from 98 to Vista.

reenum, this is a stupid question, but do I transfer Outlook that way using a floppy or CD?

At the end of it all, it's probably going to be easier to just pull the old HDD out and plug it into the new box as a slave drive, then copy everything over. Much faster and less hassle all around. Another option would be to connect the two together in a network, share the c: on the old machine and copy everything that way. This could take a while, though.