Great insights and much appreciated from each of you. Btw Sur3mac, I intend on "riding" some waves...I've grown weary of this OS and all the maintenance required....the Norton360 keeps inadvertently doing system back-ups if I'm not using it all the time and the system bogs down to the point where it takes the OS a while to speed back up and not allowing instant access to software or folders or even email when you're accustomed to speedily zipping around your desktop.
All your answers that are itemized in such a way CWA107 are fantastic. I need to actually bookmark this thread on my desktop! Well, it seems all very clear and pretty easy to interpret and understand. By rereading backwards, I think my main and ONLY concern is the actual OEM version of Windows XP Pro currently running on this old clunker then. In essence, if I still have the very first version of Windows XP Pro on CD that came with the old Dell Dimension and would that not be enough to completely transfer everything from this old unit to a new Mac? Curious....

Additionally, I am in a sparsely populated region of upper midwest. There are PC sellers and PC repair places, but no Mac sellers. I am wondering if they allow newbies to post URLs to their websites to familiarize you with what I do...?