[jamesx121]

my sister keeps whining about all the pictures & music she has on her broken laptop.
her boy friend cracked the screen. HP wants 600$ to fix
it does have a old style vga port so I can hook up a separate monitor to it.

my question is best way to remove her picture & music folder.
burning data disk DVD's over & over is a pain. more than a gb to transfer
plus I seem to loose the music track information last time I tried to create a music data disk.
all it shows on the data disk is track1,track2, track3, and so on--- nothing about artist name or name of record/song

what cable would you use to hook up laptop directly to my desktop computer--would my computer
be able to recognize the laptop drive??? would I be able to work with the files once I transferred them to my computer

Ive got a Linksys N router but I just use it for wi-fi . Ive never been able to get
the separate computers to see each other on the network. my security is set to wpa2
so never used / tried file transfer

[jamesx121]

part 2
I thought about a thumb drive.
would all the music format information and picture names still be there if I used a thumb drive to transfer
the files . I know the drive wouldn't hold the whole folder at once.
and last what about the big box stores. how much do they charge for data recovery
and would I be able to work with the files. loose administrator rights to files

[crjdriver]

A big box store ie best buy type is the last place to ever take a drive for data recovery. Most simply send it off to a real recovery service and add a few $ to the price. Really a router is not hard to use. Just make sure each computer on the network is part of the same workgroup and select what folders or drives you want to share. It helps if you have an account with the same user name and pw on each system however it is not needed, you would just have to login with the existing user/pw.

You may need to take ownership of the files once you copy them to your sister's new computer however that is a pretty easy task to accomplish.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../cc753659.aspx

Either via the network or using a large flash drive would work fine for you. Another option would be to pull the drive out of the broken system and install it into an external housing. This one is for both 2.5 and 3.5 sata drives
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817153071

If you need an enclosure with ide, then this one will work for you.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817182145