Bringing Mac back to my life... have technical questions.

Hi there! I am new to this forum. I have a few questions about buying a new mac that I was hoping somone could advise me on.

Situation: I have a mac laptop that I ABSOLUTELY LOVED/LOVE. It started breaking down about 2 and a half years ago. I was having a baby at the time so I was not able to invest in fixing it. I am now wanting to get back into my mac universe (so sick of this infested pc). However, I am all but certain that repairs to my old ibook g3 would be more expensive than buying a new one all-together. Battery won't charge. Cd player is broken. Power cord would have to be replaced. Not starting at all at this point, even though I have gone through all the reset procedures. So, I am going to be buying a used mac laptop soon.

However, all my expensive software is on the old laptop. Thousands of dollars worth. The installation disks were accidently thrown away when we were moving. I am wondering what I can do to get the software from the old computer to the new one.

1. Would my hardrive or its programs continue to function if I moved the actual hard drive to the new computer? Would my programs work if I simply transferred the contents of the one hard-drive to the other?

2. Can a mac hard drive be removed put in a new laptop? Would it have to be the same model exactly?

3. Is there a way to transfer the hard drive info from the old hd to the new one with only one working computer?

4. If I upgrade to a power-book and attempt to transfer the info from one hard-drive to the other, will it work? Does it matter if the model or OS is different?

Thank you for your answers. I've been looking for this information online for a couple weeks now and I seem to be finding answers that are only vaguely related to my questions.

Again, Thanks!

I'm not a pro, but I'll attempt to answer some of the questions.

1. I don't think so. You would need quite recent programs to run on Leopard. What version of Mac OS did you run?

2. Yes, it can. But not to be booted through. Only for retrieving data. Your G3 is PowerPC while the new macs are Intel.

3. You could get an inexpensive hard drive casing for the old hard drive and plug it into the new one via USB.

4. Information is/should be compatible for most file types as long as you have the applications to read those files. For instance, an old PSD file will open in Photoshop CS3 if that's what you're asking.

Goobimama~~ THANK YOU!

Buying an inexpensive hd case sounds like the perfect solution. Would I still have problems with compatability?

Switching Notebooks, saving HD programs???

Hi... I'm not sure where this question fits, but this seems to be the best category. Excuse me if I am posting in the wrong area. I have posted this already in the Switchers forum.

I have a broken ibook. I'm sure (mostly because of my rural location and lack of mac experts here), it will be cheaper to buy a better used one than to have this one fixed. Battery stopped charging. Won't start-up at all. Power cord issues. Broken CD drive. Etc....

Is there a way to get programs from the old hard drive (the discs have been lost) to work on the new laptop. What if I upgrade to a better laptop and a newer OS? I believe the old laptop worked on a version of OS X Jaguar.

What is the best way to achieve this? Can it only be done with an identical machine?

Thanks!

NOTE: Merged crossposts

I don't think you should. All USB drives will recognise on the Mac. And for most file types, there will be a software to read it...