Q I want to give away my desktop PC after retrieving some photos and files and then erasing the hard drive. But I don't know how to copy the data; my CD drive is broken and my flash drive is not being accepted by the USB port. Could I use the floppy disk drive? And what's the best way to erase the hard drive?
TIM QUINLAN, OTSEGO
A The easiest solution is to buy a new flash drive and see if it will work in the USB port. A floppy disk has too little storage capacity to be useful.
If that doesn't work, you could e-mail the information to yourself as attachments. But many e-mail services limit e-mail attachments to 25 megabytes, so if you've got a lot of data that could take a while.
Alternatively, you could buy a few gigabytes of online storage for about $5 a month. You could upload the data from your old computer to your online storage, then retrieve it with a new computer. (See "online storage services review" at tinyurl.com/cbz4eh.)
You also could remove the hard drive from the old computer and convert it into an external hard drive that could be read by a new PC through a USB connection. See tinyurl.com/n8sfmu for instructions.
To erase the old PC's hard drive, download and run a free "secure erase" program at tinyurl.com/2xoqqw. Click on the "download freeware secure erase utility," which is recommended by the University of California.
Q I'm running two operating systems -- Macintosh OS X and Windows Vista -- on my MacBook Pro by using VMWare Fusion (a "virtualization" program that allows them to share the same computer without affecting each other.) After doing some software upgrades, I bought two new Hewlett-Packard printers, an Officejet Pro 8000 and a Photosmart All-In-One D110, both of them wirelessly connected to the MacBook. But now only the Macintosh operating system can use the printers; Windows can't print at all. What can I do?
