Looking for help in transitioning PC files to new iMac

[trifona]

We just bought a new 24" iMac on Saturday...it is gorgeous, and our first Mac in more than 10 years. I used to have a PowerPC 7100/66 running System 7.5 in college and my wife had an old Performa. Once my custom XP box died a couple of months ago, I couldn't stomach the idea of building a new one with Vista. That and I just wanted something that would work intuitively out of the box for making videos, etc.

The help section on the Mac website is not very descriptive so I could use some help. The sales guy at the Apple store said we would need an ethernet crossover cable, but Apple.Com says that we only need a regular ethernet cable. I have a 300GB drive full of MP3's and videos i need to transfer.

Can anyone please confirm which cable I need and once I connect the two computers what steps I need to take to transfer my files over?


Thank you!

 

[Super Macho Man]

You can use either a crossover cable or a regular cable. Once you've got them connected, just start file sharing on one, and then mount the shared drive on the other.

 

[Mindflux]

I just did this last thursday on my new iMac.

Share out your drive letters on XP, then in the mac finder press command-k (I think)? to bring up the network connection and then put in smb://pcname/sharename

this will connect you to that pc (may prompt for password) and mount the share on your desktop. then just start dragging stuff where you want it.

also make sure both the pc and the mac have ip addresses in the same range. Atleast I did, and it went smooth.

 

[richard.mac]

trifona you may find this link helpful when you transfer your pcs file to your mac over the network

 

[trifona]

trifona you may find this link helpful when you transfer your pcs file to your mac over the network

Thanks to everyone who replied with advice. richthomas, I think I'll use that apple link as a walk through tonight once I install Leopard, thank you very much!

The Apple page that I was referring to that was not as descriptive I found here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304721

 

[Mindflux]

Thanks to everyone who replied with advice. richthomas, I think I'll use that apple link as a walk through tonight once I install Leopard, thank you very much!

The Apple page that I was referring to that was not as descriptive I found here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304721

That's the doc I used, worked just fine.