Got an externel hard drive, need to get stuff on it from PC

I have had a Macbook for a couple of months, but since my problem revolves around Mac OS X and Windows XP, and since basically this is the last time I will ever look at my PC again, I figured this is the place to ask this.

So I got an external hard drive today, and I went and formatted it under the Mac OS Extended as I've heard that that it is much better then FAT32. I was planning on having MacDrive help me put the stuff on my PC on the drive, but Macdrive does not work. It sees the hard drive, and it can even play stuff that is on it, but it can't put stuff on it. When I try to write on it it freezes and I basically have to restart my PC.

Now I am looking to just get the stuff on my PC to my Mac so I can then take the stuff from my Mac and put it on the drive. I have both computers hooked up with an ethernet cable, yet all the guides say to put in my PC's IP address in the "connect to server" field, yet the one that I use can't be connected to. So then I tried just a network over my wireless network. Oh jeez, even more confusing. None of the guides on the internet are helping. Some even tell me to use Disk Access on my Mac, WHICH I DON'T EVEN HAVE.

So I am at a loss now. I am really just thinking about going back to FAT32. I mean, I'm just using it to store media files. There wont be a lot of deleting and moving around of stuff once all is said and done, so I don't know if the drawbacks of FAT32 will really affect me. So please, if you have any advice on macdrive, or the ethernet attempt (like how do I find the address on my PC that I am supposed to put under server address?!) or on FAT32 vs. Mac OS Extended for media files, then please, do suggest away, because I have no idea.

Certainly FAT-32 would be easier with regard to moving the files from the PC to the external. The problem you may run into is if any of the files are approaching ~4 GB in size. As long as they are less than 4 GB, FAT-32 will work fine.

As for MacDrive, were you using the latest version 7? It should have worked unless you did not correctly install it on your Windows PC.

Regards.

You could format the drive FAT32, copy files from PC to drive, copy files from drive to Mac, format drive Mac OS Extended, copy files from Mac to drive.

Formatting the HDD as FAT32 is the only way for your PC to actually read the HDD. The mac can read it as well if it's FAT32.

Well unfortunately my Macbook doesn't have much of any space left, hence the need for an external hard drive. Oh well, I just formatted FAT32 and left it as that. There may be some video files larger than 4GB in the future (**** high definition) but I suppose with all the free space I will have left on my Mac I can just store them on there.

I usually format my external drives NTFS, and install Paragon NTFS (PARAGON Software Group - partition manager, drive backup, hard disk partitioning) on my macs. It's extremely seemless, plug your NTFS drive into your mac and you'll be able to read&write any file size without issues.