gnu

Check your "operating manual" on the new PC. If it tells you how to add a hard drive, then it shouldn't be any concern to them if its a new one or an old one.

Very few PC manufacturers will void warrenty based on installation of peripherals, if they're anything remotely close to standard. But check your own terms, of course.

A more likely problem - many new PCs are coming out with CD burners, which often use one of the two "channels" available on your IDE or EIDE card. If you have an EIDE CD-R/W and a hard drive, you don't have anyplace to plug in another hard drive without adding another EIDE card - and you don't have the IRQ & DMA resources for that, unless your PlugNPlay can alias something. It gets "iffy."

Incidentally, I have 1 Win95 laptop, 2 Win98 desktops, one Win2000Pro desktop, and a laser printer all happily sharing files on a 10BaseT ethernet. If you run your old programs under Win98 on your "cheapie" PC, the files should be "tradeable" across the LAN. But if your new XP machine can't run a program from its own hard drive, it won't run the program from the LAN.

John