I have an old HP laptop that may have finally bit the dust. We had a good run. in any case, I was able to get it working again to download all pertinent files onto an external hard drive. If I buy a new HP, downloading those onto new computer should be easy - plug in the hard drive and go. Is there any reason that it's different on a Mac? I can't connect the old HP to wireless anymore, so I'm not sure if the apple migration assistant will work. Or perhaps it would work and I just indicate that the migration is coming from a hard drive rather than another computer?