The best way to is set up the old drive as a "Slave" drive and connect it to the same computer. Inside the computer are "cables". Each hard drive get a power cable and a "wide gray cable" (not suing the technical term).

On the back of each hard drive, you will see an example how to set the drive as a slave. It is as simple as moving the plastic thing on the hard drive to the right "pins".

If you want, we can get on the phone unless you can get someone there that knows what I am talking about.

errrrrrrrrr load it onto a memory stick and then shove it into one of those holey thingies on yer new puter?

by the way, most programs will have to be resinstalled. to the new drive as they need to have entries made to the computer registry in order to work.

Byt doing what I suggested above, it will give you access to the old hard drive like it was just another partition.

Example: the "C" drive is a partition, you will possibly see a "D" or another letter in "MY Computer" When you put this other drive on the computer as a slave

I am mainly concerned with my photos and a few programs I originally downloaded from the web. I know there is a way of transferring programs from one hard drive to another. I just can't remember how.

I want to make my old drive a slave temporarily in my new computer. I have a good drive running XP on the computer I'm getting. Once the stuff I want to keep are transfered, I will replace the old drive used as a slave with a nice brand new 500+ GB hard drive to be the computers slave drive.

throw your pc right out the window, drive to your nearest Apple store and buy yourself a brand new shiney marvelous iMac.
Trust me, ust take the plunge, you'll thank me later.
;)

OfEire... I would do it, but there is toooooo many compatibility issues with the IMac and the soft ware and hard ware that I still have. I'd have to replace everything, and I am too poor to do that.