transfering data from pc to mac

I just bought a mac which I will be receiving today, and am not sure how to transfer data from my old pc laptop to my new macbook. anyone know what the easiest way to do this is?

Hey GringoBoy87,

What kind of data do you want to get from your PC to your macbook?

If it is just pictures, music, documents, etc. you can do it a couple of ways. If you have an external hard drive you can plug it up to your PC and then drag all of the items to the external hard drive. Then you need to eject the hard drive and then plug it into your macbook. Then you should be able to drag all of the stuff over to the macbook. (You can do this same method with a flash drive if you don't have that much data)

You can also burn CD's or DVD's to accomplish the same thing as above.

If you have a network cable I think you can plug it into both computers and create a network and transfer data that way as well.

Also, If you want to transfer email messages (outlook/entourage/thunderbird) you might want to do an export from the menu of those programs. Then you can drag that export to the external or CD as well. Then when you open up mail you can import from a previous library.

Does that help?

Remember if you use a external hard drive ensure it is in fat32 format, so that both the Mac and PC can read/write.

nirvana said:

Remember if you use a external hard drive ensure it is in fat32 format, so that both the Mac and PC can read/write.

Click to expand...

If all you are doing is transferring from PC to mac then it only needs to be writable by the PC i think....

As I understand it, OS X can read FAT32 and NTFS so it would only matter if PC can read/write to the HD.

I could be wrong though...

You could just enable File Sharing on the Windows laptop and copy over a network. Lemme dig up those directions....

Ok, using this article from Apple, you can turn on Windows File Sharing on your Mac and log into your Mac from Windows. Then just copy over what you like.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107083

Here's an alternate tutorial that helps you set up file sharing on both machines. Then you can connect from either to the other.
http://www.ifelix.co.uk/tech/3020.html

EDIT: BTW... it doesn't matter with this method what file system the drives are formatted with. Wholly irrelevant.

jdgti said:

If all you are doing is transferring from PC to mac then it only needs to be writable by the PC i think....

As I understand it, OS X can read FAT32 and NTFS so it would only matter if PC can read/write to the HD.

I could be wrong though...

Click to expand...

Out of the box, OS X can read/write to FAT32, and read-only NTFS. Now with a couple free 3rd-party add-ons, you can enable OS X to write to NTFS also.

I would also recommed transferring it over direct network connection. It's much faster and doesn't duplicate the task. It's pretty easy to setup also.

Thanks so much everyone for the help! i ended up using an external hard drive and it worked beautifully. i was able to transfer all of my microsoft office documents, music, and pictures over to my mac. i have no idea what FAT32 or NTFS is but i sure as heck can come up with some creative acronyms for them, lol. again, thanks for all of the responses!