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turtlebud

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 17, 2002
590
45
My sister just got a new imac for christmas and will need to move her files over from her 5 year old Dell running Windows ME. I believe the Dell only has USB 1.1, no firewire, and no CD burner. I'm trying to find the best way to move the files over for her and am looking for suggestions. My plan is to use a firewire enclosure that I have, take out the internal hard drive, and connect it to her imac so it can show up as an external drive. Does anyone one if this should work? I'd be mainly copying over pictures and documents (word, excel, etc.).
 
I'm certainly no expert, but I think that'll work just fine considering that Windows ME uses FAT32 (again I think) which Mac reads just fine.

I've been able to use both my FAT32 and NTFS drives with my Mac (the NTFS I can only read from, I believe). I saved all of my files to hard drives and then put them in a USB 2.0 enclosure similar to what you intend to do.
 
I'd go with the USB enclosure idea. And if she needs to read and write office documents, NeoOffice is a good choice.
 
Connect the Windows machine and the Mac on the same network. Use Windows Sharing on the Mac, and mount the Mac share on windows using UNC paths (the windows file-sharing system pref will tell you what to use). You can then transfer all the documents from the PC to the Mac through the network, which should not take very long.

If you are not going to but MS Office for the mac, consider using NeoOffice which will handle MS Office docs fairly well:

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/15797

Hope this helps.
 
5 year old Dell running Windows ME.

sound like hell.
i'd recommend, emailing the important ones to yourself.
and not holding onto stuff you dont need.
the rest i'd copy over usb, but ince its 1.1 it'd be pretty slow.

i also recommend steering clear of dell for the rest of your life jk:)
 
sound like hell.
i'd recommend, emailing the important ones to yourself.
and not holding onto stuff you dont need.
the rest i'd copy over usb, but ince its 1.1 it'd be pretty slow.

i also recommend steering clear of dell for the rest of your life jk:)

haha, nice one. needless to say, the whole family was pretty excited to get the computer. after getting over the amazement that the WHOLE computer was there in the monitor, they buzzed over being able to take their pictures for each of their account, and the remote/front row. i think there's going to be a bit of a learning curve, but I have no doubt they're going to love it after they get used to it and yes, hopefully they will steer clear of dell for the rest of their lives :)

thanks for the input everyone, seems like i have a couple of options (network or enclosure).
 
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