Stormin Mormon wrote:
A fellow I know, but never met. He's got two computers.
Desktop running XP, and laptop running Vista. He wants to
copy a couple gb of files, from one to the other.

So far, he's been copying some with a flash drive, and dump
them onto the other computer. It's taking a long time.

Suppose he takes a USB cable, from one computer to the
other. Would each computer show up as another drive, to the
other? Use windows explorer to click and drag and drop? Send
the data through the USB cable.

And what if one of the computers was turned off? Would the
USB cable provide enough power to spin the other drive, and
allow the data transfer?

I don't think so. Even if he could, USB connection speed is terribly slow
for that sort of thing.


The better way is to network the two computers. Each PROBABLY has a network
port built in, so it's merely a matter of a cat-5 cable connecting them and
following the steps outlined in the networking wizard.

Of course the instructions are in geekeze, so he'll need the help of a
12-year-old male.

An alternative, assuming both can access the internet and he has a
high-speed connection, is to use the 8-or-so Gigabyte storage offering of
Google Mail and send the files as attachements from one machine while
retrieving them with the other machine.