southerndoc said:
It depends. What kind of laptop did you buy?
If you have a Macintosh, and are moving from a Windows PC, then Move-2-Mac is a program that will help you migrate.
Wow, southerndoc, you really are a mac devotee. I can't blame you, I love my g4 PB. But you don't have to buy any software.
If you don't have a mac, either as the new computer or the old computer, it is easy. If you do, it's just as easy.
If you can network the two computers (via any combination of WiFi and ethernet) it should be straightforward. Just connect them both to the network (control panel>>system settings), turn on sharing on the desktop computer, tell the desktop computer which folders you want to share, and then go to your laptop, go to network neighborhood, connect to the desktop computer and drag & drop from the desktop to the laptop. Depending on the amount of data you need to transfer this may take a while. Just walk away and usually a few hours later it will transfer everything over. If the new computer is a mac, you don't need to configure it for the network, it does it by itself. Clever little machine, it is.
If you can, take out the old desktop HD & put it into a USB HD enclosure and connect it to the laptop. This will be the fastest transfer speed. (It also works from PCs to macs, but not the other way. Macs can read NTFS and FAT32, but windows will not read HFS+.) You can get a program from mediafour (I forgot the name of the program) that will install drivers on a PC to allow it to read an HFS formatted drive. At $50, it's really your call. If you can network the computers it is really not worth it.
If the desktop has a CD/DVD burner, you can use that, too. CD-Rs are cheap. DVD-Rs are cheap. I would do this.... Again, a mac will read the PC disks, but the PC will not read the mac disks.
If this is at all confusing - and given my fractured language abilities today, it very well is - google definitely will help. Or go to Dell's support forums. This question has invariably been answered there very eloquently and comprehensively.
I hope this helps!