External Hard drive PC to Mac Transfer...

Hey everyone,

I have searched the forum, but have not found any threads to what I am looking for, if there is one please link me.

Here's the deal: Just bought a new MBP a few weeks ago.
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Hard Drive: 320 gb
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Memory: 4gb
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

At the moment I'm primarily using it for just web browsing, email, school papers, etc...but eventually will use it for music production.
I'm wanting to buy an external hard drive to transfer over my files and music from my XP laptop, and I have been looking at :
Brand New Western Digital 1TB My Book Essential 2.0 USB - eBay (item 300344734111 end time Sep-10-09 20:29:00 PDT)

and if I dont get that one I will get:
Newegg.com - Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive WDH1U10000N - External Hard Drives

I would like directions on exactly how to transfer all my files from my Windows XP laptop to the external Hard drive then hook it up to my MBP. Also, I have installed the Sims 3 on my MBP, can I uninstall it and then reinstall it on the external to save space on my MBP? I'm looking to save the overall health of my MBP, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Either hard drive should be fine. It will probably come formatted with the FAT32 file system, in which case it should work fine for both the XP and OSX operating systems. Just plug it into your XP laptop, transfer the files, then plug it into your MBP and it should come up to transfer everything back over. The only drawback with a FAT32 partition is that no one file can exceed 4GB of size.

I'm afraid you probably won't be able to play Sims 3 over your external drive, I think you'll have to install it on your MBP's hard drive.

One last quick question...If there is a virus on my PC and I transfer the files to the external harddrive will that effect the hard drive and/or my MBP?

If you install Windows on your Mac, they can and will affect Windows. Other than that, no.