Laptop to PC

[ferociousfish]

Hi all. I have a small problem. I have a old desktop (runs xp so not old -old) and it is finally on its last legs (fans given up and it shuts down after 10 minues and the monitor has blown) However it has a heap of old photos on the hard drive that my wife desperately wants. Now my question is can I hook my laptop up to the desktop to read and copy what is on that hard drive. Can I do this via a cat5 cable? Do I need any additional software, and does each computer need to be hooked up to the internet? I can't use the monitor at all on the desktop so I can't see anything on it to change settings - everything needs to be done via the laptop. Any help would be appreciated so I can stop the wife whinging at me.:)

[cszeto]

You may be "over engineering" your situation. An external drive enclosure will probably be a lot more reliable in the situation that you described.

[Sooner Al]

Hi all. I have a small problem. I have a old desktop (runs xp so not old -old) and it is finally on its last legs (fans given up and it shuts down after 10 minues and the monitor has blown) However it has a heap of old photos on the hard drive that my wife desperately wants. Now my question is can I hook my laptop up to the desktop to read and copy what is on that hard drive. Can I do this via a cat5 cable? Do I need any additional software, and does each computer need to be hooked up to the internet? I can't use the monitor at all on the desktop so I can't see anything on it to change settings - everything needs to be done via the laptop. Any help would be appreciated so I can stop the wife whinging at me.:)

Can remove the hard drive and bring it to a family member or friends house, temporarily install it in one of their machines and copy the files off to a CD/DVD/flash drive. If you do this make sure the drive jumpers are set to be a slave. Usually the jumpers on the drive are marked with a cheat sheet diagram to show which jumper configuration is master versus slave.

[cszeto]

The warranty status of the other system should be factored in prior to opening it up and voiding the warranty.