On ebay you can find a device I like called a disk drive 'rack' or carrier. You put it in like a floppy drive, on the other 1/2 you put in any disk drive. Then you can plug in the disk like a floppy and run it anytime you want to look at the drive. This could be something for $14 that would help you to move files from old , hard drive, to a new one $60 for 750gb on amazon. JDMADERA has the disk racks for serial (SATA or parallel) or you can use an external hard drive, or any drive with an external adapter $14. I personally like the reasoning of buying a new drive to put all my files on it. I get a new drive, I copy my old files and test the new drive for a while before I commit to it , and have the chance to sell my old drive while having a backup. Another idea: If many files are text based then zip or RAR them and mail them to yourself. Many mail sites accept 2mb up to 20mb mail attachments. That might handle most of your documents and that way you have them backed up. It's a secondary backup.. you should still have them somewhere else but one site I use has been good to me for 5 years, for free, holding 40mb of stuff. I apoligize if I didn't answer your Q excactly. I'm in a hurry and tried to offer what I could to what I thought I saw in your post.. in a 30 second quick read. Andre

You can "export" your email addresses to a USB drive and "import" them on your new computer File->Export->Address Book->Text File-> using "Browse" find the location of your USB drive. Name your file and follow the steps in the wizard to finish. On your new computer go to File->Import and follow the steps to import the data from your USB drive You can do the same for exporting/importing your Internet Favorites. It is located under File->Export. Just follow the wizard. I have never had any luck moving the actual email files. I am sure there is a way - but every attempt I have made has failed. I know there was a software you could purchase to "back up" OE, and then restore it on a new machine. I didn't want to buy anything though. You could try forwarding the emails (from your old machine) that you want to keep to yourself - then retrieving them on the new machine.

The email might not be the best option, depending on your connection. If you reduce the file size of the picture, you reduce the quality of the image. They have really inexpensive USB drives out now. I bought a 1GB drive for $14. You just drag your pictures over until it is full, then drag them into your MyPictures folder on your new computer. It is reusable - just delete them off after you have them transfered and do it again until you are finished. A CD will hold less than a 1GB USB drive. Large USB drives are available. Hopefully you don't have thousands of pictures on your computer - I have 10's of thousands! Make sure you learn how to use your burner and back up your photos soon - hard drives fail, no matter how new the machine - you are on borrowed time if you do not backup your pictures, and it only takes a few minutes.

"Everything" covers a lot of ground, including some things you may not want. Were you running any 16-bit apps on that XP box? Be prepared for them to not run under 8.1 . Are you sure there are no "nasties" lurking around? If there are, they may get transferred too. As to Documents-Pictures-Video...do you really have so many that it would be inconvenient to put them on a flash drive and simply drag/drop them to the new computer? I won't address email except to say that if you really need to retain old ones, you should research the instructions specific to the email client you use. You could also forward the important ones to your own junk email address and then forward them back to yourself once you have email set up on the new machine. I am not inclined to trust anything that Microsoft says is "easy", but that's just me.