gosh you guys respond quick...awesome....one last thing if you dont mind.....my little cousin, who is now chained to the back fence....managed to go online and infect my desktop HD with all these programs running in the background....i think this is before i got a firewall and virus scanner and stuff...btw, the programs have a .exe at the end and use ungodly amounts of resources....might i corrupt my hopefully pristine new laptop by hooking up an old HD via firewire...thank you again!

i am aware that i can buy a product to hook up my old HD to my new laptop and, i cant neccesarily boot off of it but just use it for storage, correct? but can i corrupt the new computer using the old HD? assuming the old HD has destructive content....any insight would help.....thanks!