I’m a cunning linguist at times.
i see what you did there
It all comes down to your definition of “stuff”.
If you’re talking about programs you have installed the suggestion to reinstall or repair the windows install on the new computer and just add your hard drive as a second drive won’t really help you. None of those installed programs will run on the new computer without being reinstalled (unless they’re really old and really simple programs that don’t make registry entries or use any system files).
If the “stuff” is just data (music, videos, porn, documents etc) you’d be all set.
With the difference in age between the two the chances of putting your hard drive into the new computer and hoping windows plug and play can simply fix the driver issues is slim to none. The big problem is the power management stuff that windows sets up during the install that will be far different between the two machines. You can give it a shot but realize there is a chance that it will screw up the windows install so bad that when you put the drive back in your old computer it won’t boot anymore either.
There is one other option I can think of. “Acquire” (you know, download/steal) a copy of Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery. It has a full system backup feature that allows you to restore to different hardware. I’ve used it here at work to take a high end rackmount 2003 server running our FTP site and restore it onto a shitty whitebox (for testing purposes). Other than having to re-activate 2003 server by calling Microsoft every single piece of installed software and software settings came back in the restore.
So you could use that to make a backup of your entire old computer (to a removable drive you could probably borrow from someone), then restore that image to your new computer. It should bring over every program/setting/piece of data you have.
Thanks for all the responses. This seems like a good option. I have a copy of Windows here, so I can wipe the drive on the f-ed comp clean. So, after that’s done, I plug the hard drive from my old comp into the slave plug on the hard drive cable, correct? Then what? Does the comp just figure out that there is something plugged in there and I can access it just like it’s another drive?
Make sure you set the jumper on the back of the new (to you) hard drive to Master and your old one to Slave. Other than that, if you do it once Windows is on the new drive, adding the slave should be plug and play.
On a two year old computer, assuming it’s NOT SATA, it’s probably a cable-select setup, meaning that you just plug the old drive into the slave connector, and leave the jumpers on the cable select jump. Setting master/slave jumpers hasn’t been standard operating procedure for years, unless I’m greatly mistaken.