Okay...newbie here..we have two computers. My work computer IBM we had built for us 6 years ago, finally just up and died one day when we were having power surges (high winds) and apparently the electric kept coming on and off. Of course, I have several stories written in Microsoft Word that I need this week. Is there a relatively easy way to hook up the old hard drive to my kid's computer (it has Microsoft Works and I did install Microsoft Word the version on my old computer) so that I can get the files? Please let me know if there's a site that can walk me through it. Or ...is this a task better off asking someone to do. Maybe...could someone get my harddrive and burn the contents onto a CD Rom and give it to me? Or...we have a CD burner on our kid's computer..is that something I could do? Excuse my ignorance and thanks in advance for the help! Andrea

It really isn't that difficult to put a hard drive in a computer, it's getting all the settings and jumper right that counts. Hopefully your HD is still alive and active and can be jumpered to slave and added to an IDE cable on the kid's. It's then a matter of making sure everything is detected and will work as expected. Hopefully someone will list a site having pictures of the procedure cuz I don't have any listed on my favs right now. Clyde

Thanks Clyde..that would be helpful....hopefully someone will have the links. We do have a friend that I believe troubleshoots computers....is this the type of job that I should ask him to do or do you think that a reasonably-optimisitic-mom-with-little-computer-knowledge could do the job?! Andrea :^)

It's not that difficult a job, but there are some pitfalls. Any time you mess around inside a computer there is the potential to cause more problems. Since you are pressed for time, I think I would suggest getting your friend to do it.

Take a look at this page. You would only need to do from step3 onwards. If after looking at how it's done, you feel confident, have a go at it. Remember to discharge any static electricity from you body before touching anything inside. Hope this helps.

Andrea, you can connect your old drive to the kids PC using the same ribbon cable that connects to their hard drive (normally it will have spare plug on it). You will have to set the jumper on your old drive to slave. When you start Windows a message will show indicating a second drive has been detected and asks you to confirm if this is correct. Windows then starts normally but when you open 'my computer' you will see your second drive is listed with the letter D:\ and your CD drive then becomes E:\ You can right click on this D:\ drive, select open and you will see your old desk top set up. Searching for files with the extention .doc .txt etc will allow you to copy and paste into a folder on the kids drive. When I did this on a friends drive, the computer ran very, very slow. But at least I rescued the data. If the above sounds difficult, you can always do a straight swap - your hard drive for the kids hard drive. You will have to set the jumpers on the back of your hard drive the the same set up as on the kids HD. Save to a floppy. The only problem here might be if your kids PC's bios will not recognize your HD. This happens if your HD is larger than 8.5mb? on an old bios. A jumper is a metal clip (covered in plastic) that connects two pins together on the back of the drive. Hope this helps and I didn't waffel too much. Good luck and report back if you were successful or if you have any probs.