Hi ScrapperSkip. Oh, good, I misunderstood. Glad you're not getting dragged into being their tech support guy just so you be their e-waste guy.
If their old computer won't power up, then just as you said, they would need to remove the drive from their old machine and use an external adapter to connect it to their new computer via a USB port. Then they can copy or move their data to the new machine's hard drive. The adapters are reasonably priced -- I think you can get one for under $20. Of course, it's always possible that their old computer died because the hard drive failed. In that case, either they'll have to use a backup (if they were remembering to back up their data regularly--unlike me) or they'll have to try to recover as much as possible from the old drive. For data recovery, if they want to try to do it themselves, they'll need to download data recovery software to the new computer. For PCs and Macs, they should be able to find something online that's either free or fairly cheap. Sometimes it's pretty easy to recover most or all of the data, but not always. Otherwise they can take it to whoever provides tech support in your area and have them do it.
I think I'm going to go back up my drive now...
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