I used a Tornado for that. Hooked it up to the old PC and into the laptop. Spiffy and wonderful. BtD recommended it. Worked like a charm for me.

That looks pretty cool actually. The external exclosure will also work for accessing random drives we have that aren't in PC's. (this is for a business.) May have to pick up The Tornado too though.

Not to start a format war, but one cool feature that is built in to all Macs is Target Disk Mode. If you hold down the "T" key during startup, it doesn't load the OS, but instead runs the hard drive in computer as if it were an external drive that can be connected to a Mac or PC via a Firewire cable.

Assuming that the old computer is still functional, then getting files moved to the new machine shouldn't be that difficult regardless of format. Just put both computers on the same network and set up filesharing.